


We've Waited for the Calling

by allthebros



Series: Harvest Falls [1]
Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Aftermath, Alternate Universe - Small Town, Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood Friends, Codependency, Curses, First Time, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Horror, M/M, Magic, Major Character Injury, Monsters, Permanent Injury, Quests, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 21:34:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16941156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthebros/pseuds/allthebros
Summary: The town of Harvest Falls rests in a nest of cornfields. It leans back into corn, then pine trees, then mountains. And for 364 days and a half out of the year, Harvest Falls is paradise. But every garden of Eden has its snake, and Harvest Falls’ is as dark as its light is. Darker. Dark enough that no light is worth the price of that one night. Not to Jonny, anyway.Today is Harvest Day, and today, well, today, Jonny has a plan.





	We've Waited for the Calling

**Author's Note:**

> omg this is it. The longest thing I've written for this fandom so far. I can't believe it's done. The idea came to me when I needed a break from my BBFE fic and wanted to write a little Halloween story. It was supposed to be short, really, just a small thing. But then it kept growing and growing and it ate at my brain and so I just had to write it all out. I made it my BFFE story instead and here we are--this is why you're getting a Halloween-ish story in December (though Halloween isn't mentioned once).
> 
>  **Thank you** ; to sorrylatenew. There aren't enough words to express how thankful and grateful I am for your help. Not only for being such a good friend, but for brainstorming the whole thing with me, for being my constant cheerleader, and the greatest of beta through all of this, even though it was only supposed to be a short fic. All remaining mistakes are my own. <333
> 
>  **Thank you** ; to hatrickane, jezziejay, fenweak, anythingthrice and everyone who has shown support and enthusiasm on twitter, tumblr, and in chats. It means a lot and I really really appreciate it.
> 
>  **Thank you** ; to fenweak for the beautiful graphic you can see at the end of the fic. Check out her post on tumblr as well [HERE](https://fenweak.tumblr.com/post/181019522826/weve-waited-for-the-calling-by-allthebros-the)
> 
>  **Thank you** ; to the organizers and mods of the fest: fenweak, cuddlefighter, and namesintherafters. You guys did an amazing job, and this fic wouldn't exist or be finished without your fest.
> 
>  **Content/Warnings** : This fic is pretty dark and deals with heavy themes, especially around grief and mourning. Tragedy and trauma around a dark curse. Some past family members are dead. There's physical permanent injury. If you need more details about any of the tags, head over to the end notes for a (spoilery) rundown. If you'd like more details about one thing but don't want to read all the spoilers, or if you have more questions, you're welcome to message me on tumblr (same username). PM and asks are open. 
> 
> Title of the fic from Alison Sudol's song _Escape the Blade_ which really fits this story as a whole too.

 

 

It’s Harvest Day and Jonny has a plan.

Tucked in the back pocket of his jeans with a small notebook and a Swiss army knife, is his list. It’s a simple list, though there’s nothing simple about what he’s setting out to do.

He closes the door to his house quietly behind him and stands on the stoop for a moment, scratching at his left arm through his flannel. He catches at a scab there, winces, flattens his hand over his bicep, and gives it a good squeeze instead to get rid of the itch. 

He doesn’t tell his mom or dad he’s leaving. If he did, they’d see it on him somehow, that goodbye he doesn’t want to say, and the possibility of finality in his voice, in the line of his shoulders. He’s never been a great liar. It’s safer to just go, to force himself not to turn back, to not take one (possible) last look behind him, at the house he grew up in, at the parents he loves. Force himself not to think what it would do to them if their last living son never came back.

The sun is going down, deep orange and bloody red, the light so thick it paints the roofs and walls of the houses, the streets and the parks, in warning. 

It’s all about to start.

Jonny can’t worry about it. He has to stick to his plan, has to stick to his list, the first item on it written in block letters more carefully than he’s ever written anything in his life:

**1\. RAISE A GHOST**

◉

The town of Harvest Falls rests in a nest of cornfields. It leans back into corn, then pine trees, then mountains. You drive west to get to it, and then east to get out on the same stretch of asphalt you drove in. The town itself is worthy of a Hallmark movie. There is no wrong side of the tracks, no poor side of town, no decrepit buildings. The parks are green and well maintained, and the streets are clean. In December, the whole place is so bright and jolly, you can spot it from miles away on that flat road. There are quaint B&Bs and quaint shops and quaint festivals. On the 4th of July, they drive floats down Main Street, from the edge of town all the way to the loop at the back of the mill and then back again to the starting point. Everyone in Harvest Falls has a job if they want one, and no one ever gets anything worse than the occasional flu, or mild injury.

For 364 days and a half, Harvest Falls is paradise. 

But every garden of Eden has its snake, and Harvest Falls’ is as dark as its light is. Darker. Dark enough that no light is worth the price of that one night. Not to Jonny, anyway.

Everyone knows the tale. 

Two-hundred odd years ago, the good people of Harvest Falls—then Black Hawk Creek—made a deal. A deal to save themselves, to save their children. Disease had come to Black Hawk Creek, had settled in its bones. It crept into their crops, into their water, into the youngest and oldest of them all, festering and gnawing at them from the inside.

Their despair was so great, so absolute, that it called him out of the darkness, the one they would later name The Harvester, though he is nameless, ageless. And at the end of that dark night, a deal was struck, an agreement entered, a price paid. 

Harvest Falls is still paying that price, every year, on this day.

Harvest Day.

Jonny heads west towards the mill, working his way from the center of town to the edge at a brisk pace. Around him, doors open, children skip out, parents cry. He stares ahead, his feet swift, his ears closed. It’s the children he can’t bear to see, their joy and happiness and the drunk delirious haze that clouds their eyes. He remembers that haze so well, he can almost feel it buzzing under his skin, a phantom limb, a lick of it like it remembers him too.

A scream rings through the air, and before he can stop himself, he turns towards the sound. Melody Proud is clinging to her daughter with clenched fists. Ugly, painful sobs escape her mouth, a desperate, uncontrolled sound that stabs Jonny between the ribs. Her face is red and puffy, tear-stained, a manic, terrified look that will live in Jonny’s mind for a long time. He can already feel it etch itself there among other things he wishes he could unsee. 

Eloise can’t be more than five. This must be her first Harvest. 

His mother must have looked the same on Jonny’s first Harvest, nothing like the fearful and sad resignation of later years, and the ‘I love you’s she’d press into his skin until Jonny couldn’t hear her anymore, until he had to go, right now, where the fun and the games and the bright lights were. Now now now, mom, I have to go now. 

Jonny is frozen to the spot, eyes glued to them. He’s never been on this side of it, has never seen what it’s like to not be the one hitting the streets and heading for the fields. Last year was the first time he wasn’t Called, but he spent the whole night in the Kanes’ treehouse, waiting for Patrick.

“Jonathan?” someone says behind him, kicks him out of his stare, out of having to listen to Mr. Dubois tell Melody to, “Let go, honey, let her go. She has a chance this way.”

Mrs. Pratchett, the old librarian in his mother’s book club, touches his arm, repeats his name, says, “Jonathan, are you alright?” looking in his eyes for something. It takes Jonny a moment to get his bearings, to stop seeing the horror and fear on Melody’s face, and the skipping joy in Eloise’s steps as she runs down the street to join the others. 

“I’m fine,” he tells Mrs. Pratchett, and his voice sounds strange to his ears, flat and too calm.

“You’re not—” she starts, and Jonny realizes she was scared he was going to the fields with the others even though he’s two years out of the deal, scared of what it would mean if he had been.

Well. He _is_ going to the fields, but not because of what she thinks. He covers her hand.

“I’m not,” he says, gives her a small smile. “Just going to a friend’s. First Harvest for his kid too, you understand.”

An easy lie that brings a look of relief to her old, grief-filled face. She pats his arms a couple times in understanding and lets him go. Jonny cuts behind a house as soon as he’s turned the corner, Eloise already out of sight, already pressing her small body between the tall corn stalks with a laugh. She’ll be scared, later, she’ll feel the night press over her, the corn bend and whisper, she’ll feel that terror that lives at the center there, its shadow drawing her closer. Jonny will never forget. Years from now—twenty, thirty—he’ll wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweat, a dark, tomb-like voice there in his head, calling, calling, calling.

◉

He freezes at the edge of the corn. The children have all been swallowed by the tall stalks, but he can still hear the rustle, dry leaves crackling as they run. Can still hear their laughter drifting on the wind.

The sun has gone down behind the mountain, limning it in red and gold. It stretches dark in the distance. Long, brown shadows over the forest crawl towards Harvest Falls. Soon, they’ll all be covered in it, the darkest night of the year. But for now, Jonny still stands in the light, soaking up the last rays.

 _Come,_ the corn says. _Come, we’ve found him._

Jonny ignores it and looks down at his hand, tanned and warm, golden in the fading light. 

_Come._ A rustled whisper, a gust of wind over wilted leaves, the sound of shivers, of dragged feet in abandoned places.

He breathes deep. One more minute, he thinks. Just one more minute. Tension sets in his neck from the effort of not turning back, of not glancing at the looming bulk of the mill behind him to catch a glimpse of his town—his terrible, wonderful, cursed town—possibly for the last time.

 _We’ve found him… we’ve found him... the boy... the boy. Come._

He has to move. Has to get going. Has to find the bone before he can’t trust the corn anymore, but he’s stuck in place, stuck there with fear gripping him, twisting around his heart. His left arm itches like mad. It’s his last chance to turn back, to pack his car and drive away from Harvest Falls forever.

It’s impossible, though. He’d return. Everyone who ever leaves this town always comes back.

 _He’s waiting… he’s been waiting… we found him… quick… quick… He’s coming._

Something in that last word kickstarts Jonny again, shakes him loose from his own hesitation. Something scared and excited, thirsty and alive. Do it before it’s too late, he tells himself. Just… do it, you’ll see him again soon.

He plunges into the field.

Jonny is a tall man, but the corn is taller than him. It bends over his head like a lid closing him in, blocking the last of the light. Soon, he can’t see anything but shifting shadows that fade altogether the deeper he goes. All around him, the corn swishes and whispers, its voice sliding over his skin like fingers, like nails into hair, like rope meant to bound, like a snake slithering around a throat. It’s everywhere. 

_Come… quickly… quickly… over here._

If you learn stillness. If you learn silence, and patience. If there’s anger and vengeance and pain and loss in your heart, you can learn the language of the corn. Spend months inside those fields. Nights and days, summer and winter, lie on the ground with your ear against the packed earth, and listen, listen. Listen to the slow hum of sleeping roots; the underground yawn of awakening, of seeds breaking open; to the cries and exclamations and songs of joy, of growing, of breaking out of the soil, of reaching for light and sky and wind; to the words hidden in the rub between two leaves, in the leaning against a strong gale; to the secret and love of plants and dirt; to the sound of rain, the guzzling of water, right there in the mud. Listen. 

The corn around Harvest Falls is The Harvester’s corn, but it’s also the town’s. It grows out of their blood, out of their love, out of their loss. Two hundred years of their most precious treasures nourish it, allow it to grow and live. The Harvester might feed on a Harvest Falls child, but it’s the corn that lives off it, that grows out of its bones. And there’s gratitude there, as with most things allowed to thrive through care. 

Jonny is a son of Harvest Falls and he listens when the corn speaks. 

He follows that voice with his eyes closed, hands brushing past plants, pushing them aside until,

 _Here,_ it says. _Here… here… the boy… the boy of the bright white tooth._

Jonny drops to his knees. 

He takes out his phone, turns on the flashlight, sets it on the ground, and starts digging. He does it with his hands, the soil packed and cold and hard, but raising a ghost is dirty work, both metaphorically and literally. It has to be hands on. It has to cost something. 

When he catches the gleam of white among the dark dirt, he’s seized at the throat by a sudden fear. What if it’s his skull? 

_Find him... find him._

He hesitates, holds his breath, and plunges his fingers in the ground. The bone falls into his hand as he digs around it, relief washing over him. He doesn’t know what it is—the tip of a finger or a toe, maybe, small and delicate, fit into curve of his palm. He swallows hard, stares at it, at the wrongness of it being there without the boy it belongs to. He remembers how it felt when wrapped in muscle and skin and blood, to hold it in his own hands, to be touched by it, to feel it press against his body.

He fishes out his notebook and his knife, brings them close to the light, and starts carving the rune he drew inside the front cover . It’s hard work even with the light, holding the small bone between two fingers as he uses the tip of the blade. It slips and he stabs himself in the hand, a long gash in the middle of his palm that immediately starts gushing blood. It doesn’t matter. Blood is good. He smears it over the carved rune with his thumb, and holds the bone against his wound until it’s soaked red.

There are no words to say, no spell to chant. It’s not like in the movies. The power lies in memories, especially ones that hurt. It has to cost something.

Patrick, he thinks. Patrick, Patrick, Patrick, Pat— 

A small boy with a blond buzzcut, toothy grin thrown over his shoulder with a, “Wanna play?” and a—

Blue t-shirt down to his knees, on his first sleepover, arms crossed over his chest, scowl on his face. “I’m not doing it,” he says, watching Jonny doing push-ups.

“That’s cause I can do more than you,” Jonny says. “Five, six, seven—”

“Can’t.”

“Can too.”

Patrick shoves him. “Move, I’ll show you. One, two, three, four”— 

“Five days, it’s not that bad,” Jonny says, squinting at the slip of paper Patrick waved in his face. “You’ll be done by next weekend.”

“It suuuuucks,” Patrick whines, throwing himself on his bed and kicking his desk chair where Jonny sits. “I’ll miss two hockey practices.”

“We’ll survive,” Jonny says dryly, and pokes him in the side with his toe, laughing when Patrick groans into his pillow.

“I hate detention,” comes the muffled reply. “Fuck—” 

“This. Fuck it. I can’t stand this town anymore.” Jonny’s furious whisper cuts the dark. Harvest Day is coming and he’s been having nightmares about it for weeks. He doesn’t want to go.

Patrick is silent on the floor for a long time, and then, “I have three sisters,” he says softly.

Jonny blinks into the dark, lifts his covers and slides to the floor, squeezes himself between his bed and Patrick. There’s nothing he can say, it’s—

Jonny’s brother. It’s David. And Patrick—no he can’t, not that— 

Summer. It’s summer. They’re playing street hockey and Jonny knocks into Patrick too hard, sends him tripping against the curb where he falls badly on his wrist and it makes this awful cracking sound. Patrick cries out, holds it to his chest, lying on his back in the grass.

Jonny’s on his knees by his side in a second, hands fluttering over Patrick’s arms. “Oh my god, are you okay? Patrick, are you okay?”

“No I’m not, you dumbass!”

“Shit! I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Stop crying you’re freaking me out.”

“I’m not crying!” 

“Yes, you are!”

“Please don’t die!”

It shakes Patrick out of his pain for a second, eyes wide, fixed on Jonny’s, blue and wet and beautiful. Jonny’s never thought of that before, but they are. They are.

“It’s just my wrist, Jon,” he says softly, then winces. “It’s just my wrist. It just hurts. It—”

”It hurts so much,” Jonny says, head in his mother’s lap like he hasn’t done in years, her soft hands in his hair, and—No not that. This, then—

Patrick with a wide smile and a hand on Jonny’s thigh, soft-looking in the light of the camping lantern they set in the corner of the treehouse. Shy and daring, and the yes so easy on Jonny’s lips, pressing into the space between them, closing it, and—

It has to cost something. It has to cost something.

This, then:

Jonny didn’t mean to fall asleep, but he must have because he’s startled awake by a high-pitched cry. He shakes himself loose from his sleeping bag and shuffles to the treehouse’s door. 

The sun is barely over the treetops, sky pale pink and orange, washed out and grey, and the air is cold, so cold his breath forms little puffs of white as it escapes his lips. He stares at the Kanes’ house, legs dangling off the platform. He stares and he waits, dread so heavy inside he wouldn’t be able to move if he wanted to, held in place by that weight. He waits all morning. He gets so heavy over those hours, he thinks he’ll break the planks underneath him and fall down the tree, fall into the garden where three sisters are crying now. And he waits more. He waits until his dad comes to take him home.

“Jonny!”

Jonny’s eyes snap open. 

It takes him a long moment to drag himself out of his memories. Even with all the pain, a part of him wants to stay there, and he feels the way they fade as a sharp pang between his ribs. A faint bluish light pulses against the corn stalks where there was only night before, too difficult to make out its shape with the bright light from his phone in his eyes, even when he squints. He turns it off and blinks hard into the renewed darkness.

_The boy… the boy… the boy of the bright white tooth. We found him… we found him..._

“You did,” Jonny says, thickness in his throat, breath short. He looks up from where he’s kneeling in the dirt at the translucent figure in front of him. Its edges glow softly, like a sketch filled in with a thin film of light. First: a sneaker, a dirty sock, and the jeans, hole over the right knee. Then: the hoodie— _Jonny’s_ hoodie—soft and dark with a flaking, faded Nike logo on the front. Finally: a smile. _The_ smile. God, Jonny’s missed that smile like a limb.

“I did what?” Patrick Kane—his Patrick—replies.

Raise a ghost. Check.

◉

**2\. FIND THE MAZE**

Best friends, that’s what they were. Best friends on the cusp of something else, something that had been brewing and percolating inside Jonny for a long time until it seemed like it was finally ready. _They_ were ready. 

They met on Jonny’s first day of first grade. Patrick had just started kindergarten even though he was only a few months away from Jonny’s age. They fought. Jonny doesn’t remember what about, but he remembers pushing Patrick, shoving him. Remembers the guilt. He was a first grader now and shouldn’t pick on younger kids. He gave Patrick his Flintstones band-aid for his scraped elbow, Patrick punched him in the shoulder, and they were friends.

Friends who argued constantly, clashing over stupid things. Who left in a huff, but always came back, until they settled into each other in a way that Jonny, even at such a young age, knew was rare.

The longest they were ever apart—long enough Jonny thought they were done—was when they fought the day of David’s wake. 

“I wish it’d been one of your sisters!” he’d yelled at Patrick, who couldn’t understand. Couldn’t understand what it felt like, to walk out of that field after a night of terror, and not be able to find his little brother. What it felt like to run the perimeter of town screaming his brother’s name and hearing nothing back. To head back to city hall for headcount and not find him there either. To hear his mother’s cry, his father gutted sobs. To see his brother’s name added to the statue at the center of town with the others: DAVID TOEWS, 9.

They had to be separated by their parents. Ticki and Donna dragged a furious and tear-stained Patrick still screaming at Jonny to, “Take it back, asshole! Take it back!” even with a busted lip and bloody nose.

He hadn’t seen Patrick for months. Jonny hadn’t seen much of anyone that winter outside of school, hadn’t cared much about it either. He stopped playing hockey. 

One evening in February, Patrick showed up on Jonny’s doorstep with a hockey stick in his hand and hockey bag at his feet. It was bitterly cold out, he had his hat low on his head and a scarf around his face, nose bright red the way it always got in winter, like a permanent stain, and Jonny almost reached out right away to pinch it between his fingers to warm it up, the way he did sometimes. 

“It’s not fun without you,” Patrick said. 

Jonny only watched Patrick squirm on the stoop in silence. He glanced at the stick. He missed hockey. He missed Patrick. He missed going out. He missed a lot of things. He missed David most of all.

“I…” Patrick started, licked his lips, straightened his shoulders and cleared his throat. “I would have felt the same. If it had been one of my sisters. I would have and I’m sorry.”

Jonny remembers the sound of the hockey stick clattering on the porch when he surged forward to hug Patrick.

He remembers how his body had felt in his arms that night when they were eleven years old, and he remembers how it had felt years later in the cramped space of the Kanes’ treehouse, pressing against Jonny’s, goosebumps along his bare shoulders and back as Jonny held him.

And he feels the absence of that most of all, now, standing in front of him, unable to reach out and touch him. Patrick doesn’t have a body anymore. 

“You’re missing a shoe,” is the first thing Jonny says, flat and confused, before promptly puking into the corn. 

“I lost it when I died,” he hears Patrick say. He says it like it’s no big deal, just a fact. Like the sky is blue and the Chicago Blackhawks suck. 

“Jesus,” Jonny mumbles, bent over with hands on his knees. He casts a glance towards the ghost—Patrick, it’s Patrick—and has to close his eyes tight again, breathe deep. He’s been thinking about this moment for weeks, told himself he was ready. It’s fine, he tells himself. It’s fine, remember what you have to do. 

“Jonny?” 

It’s the recognition in the sound of his name that finally makes him inhale deeply and straighten up.

He hasn’t changed at all, Patrick. He’s exactly like the last night Jonny saw him, baggy clothes and blond hair cut short recently. It had felt both prickly and soft along Jonny’s palm just the night before. There aren’t any colors about him now, though—no blue eyes or blond hair or pretty pink flush on his nose. He’s a soft, shimmering outline in the air. But his face—his face—in all its expressions, is exactly like it was when he was alive. Jonny’s heart is beating so hard in his chest, it must be louder than the corn’s whispering, louder than his ragged breathing. 

He swallows. “I can’t believe it worked.”

“What—” Patrick starts, but then looks down at himself, at his body that isn’t really a body. He pats at his own chest and his hands go through it. He touches his face and his fingers only meet air. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry,” Jonny says. 

Patrick stretches an arm in front of himself, and looks through his hand. “I can see you.”

“Do you remember—”

“I remember dying, yeah.” He’s eerily calm. His brows furrow. “Even now, I can’t feel my body, but I can feel dying. It’s a terrible thing, Jon, being devoured.”

“Christ,” Jonny spits, and has to do the whole hands on knees and deep breathing thing all over again. He told himself it could be like this, that Patrick could be… different. But he didn’t—He thought maybe—

“Ah, _shit_ ,” Patrick says, and Jonny looks up sharply at the sound, at the anger and distress in it. “Fuck. Fuck, I died. I fucking died.” Patrick meets Jonny with wide eyes. “I’m a fucking ghost, aren’t I?”

It’s stupid how sudden Jonny’s relief is. Stupid and crazy how he wants to laugh and cry all at once, because that does sound like Patrick, like maybe it _is_ him. 

“Fuck,” Jonny chokes out, taking a stumbling step forward. “Fuck, I’ve missed you so much.”

He reaches out. His fingers only meet air where Patrick’s hand is. It doesn’t even feel different or colder or viscous or anything else. He’s there, but he’s also really really not.

Patrick looks down at his hand again, at the spot where Jonny touched him, and a high, hysterical, short laugh escapes his lips. He pinches them together. 

“I’m sorry,” Jonny repeats. He doesn’t know what else to day, though sorry never feels nearly close enough to express how he feels about Patrick being gone. And it’s not going to fix the fact that he raised Patrick from whatever peaceful place he was in, just to cause him more distress. But he’s not going to feel guilty at the stinging gladness he feels at seeing him again, even like this. 

Patrick seems to get a hold of himself somehow, shoulders straightening, gaze sharpening. It’s a comfort, to know he hasn’t forgotten how to read him yet, that it hasn’t been long enough for Jonny to forget.

“You’ve changed,” Patrick says eventually, eyes roving over Jonny. “How long has it been?”

“Two years.”

“My sisters—”

“They’re fine. For now, they’re fine.”

“How did you—”

“I used one of your bones to call you.”

“How?” Patrick says, with that look on his face that Jonny knows well, the one he got when he was trying to figure something out—a math problem, a hockey play. Jonny’s body.

Jonny pushes his hands in his pockets, then winces when his cut hand stings, hiss between his teeth. “Magic,” he says, using the edge of his sweater to press on the wound. “Rune and bone and blood.”

“Okay.” Patrick nods, tone in his voice that says ‘weirdo’ and sends a kick to Jonny’s heart, his lips stretching into a small smile. “But why—” he stops, looks around him, up at the sky. “It’s Harvest Day.”

Now _this_ brings Jonny back to the present. He picks up his notebook and knife, the little bloody bone. “Yes,” he says. “That’s why I called you.”

“You found my notes,” Patrick says, dawning realization on his face. 

“I did.”

Jonny doesn’t expect the anger and hurt that rises in his throat, expands in his chest. He thought he was past it, had made his peace with it, but now that he can talk to Patrick again, it feels as raw as on the day he opened the box with his name on it and found Patrick’s journals. A good two years of research inside that box he had never told Jonny about. 

_He’s coming… he’s coming… he’s coming…._ the corn says, shivering in excitement now, a rustle in a windless night.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jonny asks anyway. “Didn’t you trust me?”

Patrick is already shaking his head. “No, no, that’s not it.”

“Did you think I was too stupid to help?” He sounds childish to his own ears, but all the petty, insecure thoughts he’s ever had about it are stumbling out, and Jonny’s not just bleeding from one hand, he feels like he’s bleeding from everywhere, he feels like he’s been bleeding for years. “Because I found what was missing on my own.”

“Jonny—”

“I’m really good at research, Patrick. And I’m not fucking stupid. Sure, not everyone can be a fucking math genius or whatever, but I—”

“Jonny, I know.”

“Then why? Why didn’t you say anything? I could have helped! Maybe you—maybe you wouldn’t—” Jonny chokes on the words, feels the tears in his nose before they reach his eyes and takes a deep breath, turns away. “I waited for you all night,” he says to the corn, to the blue eerie glow Patrick’s ghost casts over the leaves. “I waited and you never came back.”

For a brief moment, even the corn is silent. 

Because he can’t touch Jonny, Patrick slips in front of him instead so Jonny has to look at him, look through him, a stalk of corn piercing his shoulder and ear and half of his body.

“I don’t know why I didn’t,” Patrick says, softly. “I wasn’t sure… After David, you never wanted to talk about it. We never did. Ever. And at first I wasn’t sure what I’d found. Just some journals and like, I thought I should make sense of them first. I didn’t want to give you false hope or whatever. It took months and I didn’t know how to bring it up after that, and then…”

“What?”

“You’ve seen, right? The list at the end of the notebook? I know I didn’t spell it out, leaving them to you was a last minute thought, but—We’re not the first ones to go after him.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Over two hundred years, we couldn’t have been the only ones, that’s what I thought after finding that first journal. So I went looking, and then I looked up all the people who had tried before, I looked up their genealogy, they have that big book at the county library… anyway, you saw right?”

Jonny had seen. Every single person that had, over the years, gathered information or tried to break the deal with The Harvester had seen someone close to them die on Harvest Day—a son, a daughter, a nephew or niece. There was always someone.

“Even if they didn’t have enough to do anything… most of them didn’t,” Patrick continues. “All the journals are different in some way, it didn’t seem like anyone had gathered all the pieces together until me, not that I could find anyway. People in this town don’t fucking _talk_. But those people, Jonny, they could never have done him any damage. I didn’t even have everything, I couldn’t even figure out how to reach him, but… He knew. Somehow he knew.”

“Patrick,” Jonny says softly, and every fiber in his body wants to hold him, wants to reach out and smooth over the panic and fear.

“I was terrified,” Patrick whispers, looking up at Jonny with wide eyes. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if he knew yet, but I couldn’t risk—You were safe at that point, but my sisters weren’t and I just. I didn’t know how to tell anyone. Not you, not anyone. I’m sorry.”

_He’s here… he’s here… he’s heeeeeeeerreeeeeeeee_

Jonny startles at the change in the corn’s voice. Where it was crackling and susurration but clear in his mind, it’s now only a brittle sort of scream. If plants could growl, Jonny thinks, pressing his hands to his ears, they would sound like this. If plants were hungry, they would sound like this.

“What?” Patrick asks.

“It’s time,” Jonny says. 

A long pause and then a smile, wide and impish. “You bastard, you’ve figured it out.”

Jonny can’t help the grin he feels at the corner of his mouth, but he bites it off quickly. The night has gotten heavier. He can feel it on his skin, a humid press like a mouth. There’s a low rumble in the distance, something he can feel in his legs, something like thunder, like a hungry stomach. “Couldn’t have done it without you,” he says. “Wanna finish what you started?”

◉

The corn bends, claws reaching for them, for the children out in the night. It’s taller now than it was moments ago, ends getting lost in the blackness of the sky. The sky might not even be the sky, Jonny thinks, looking up.

“The maze, it’s here,” Patrick says, turning in place. 

Jonny nods. “He’s at the center,” he says. “That’s where we need to go. That’s why I called you.”

“I don’t understand. I don’t think I had that part figured out.”

“One of the books you had taken note of to check out, I found it, it had a story inside, from another time, another village, somewhere in China. But it was him. I’m sure of it. And it said: only someone who has already walked through the maze and found its center can… walk through the maze and find its center.”

“But no one ever comes back from the center.”

No, they get devoured.

“Hence,” Jonny says, gesturing at Patrick.

“Jesus, that’s clever.” Patrick smiles and Jonny feels the warm glow of that praise somewhere between his lungs. “How did you even find me? There must be”—He stops to do the math in his head—“close to 55,000 bones in these fields. I can feel every single one of mine scattered all over.”

“Start walking and I’ll tell you,” Jonny says. “We have to find the entrance.”

“Where? How?”

Jonny chews on his lip. “Unclear. Just… let it happen? I think you’ll just know. You, uh, your spirit is drawn back to…”

“Where I died,” Patrick finishes for him.

For days and weeks Jonny’s been telling himself that Patrick’s ghost wouldn’t be Patrick. It would just be an image, an echo. That he shouldn’t get attached. 

He wasn’t prepared for this. For how the same Patrick looks and sounds and reacts, and for how much the pain on his face would make Jonny want to hold it between his hands and kiss it until all traces are gone. But mostly for how right it feels, like something inside him got kicked out of place when Patrick died and slid back where it belonged the moment his ghost appeared. Easy as that. 

“Let’s go,” Jonny says, curling his hands into fists and blinking against the tingling in his nose.

They walk in the dark, with only the glow of Patrick’s ghost as light. Twice Jonny catches himself wanting to put his hand on Patrick’s shoulder to make sure he doesn’t lose him. Occasionally, Patrick stops, looks around, picks up another direction.

The corn keeps growling, hungry.

“Okay,” Patrick says after a while, “so you can talk to the corn, or understand it, but how did you find my pinky bone?”

“I used one of your milk teeth.”

Patrick looks at him. “Where the fuck did you find that?”

“Your mom had kept them.”

He doesn’t tell Patrick how he’d found Donna crying in Patrick’s bedroom the day of his wake, box of memories at her feet, childhood drawings and hockey medals spilled all over her lap and onto the floor. There was a little enamel box among all the treasures. She showed it to Jonny with a little self-deprecating laugh.

“I kept all his teeth,” she said, and opened the box to show him. “Did you know he believed in the Tooth Fairy until he was, oh I don’t know, at least twelve?” She shook her head with a sad, fond smile. “Santa Claus? No, that was done by the age of eight or so, but not the Tooth Fairy. I don’t know why.” A sudden sob erased her smile, her hand flying to her mouth to muffle it. Jonny hadn’t known what to say, only brushed the top of her head with his fingers in a gesture meant to comfort but that became immediately awkward.

A couple weeks ago he’d gone back for the enamel box.

“I buried it behind the mill,” he says. “That’s how the corn found you. I guess it knew what to look for, like… like giving a missing child’s shirt to a dog so he can sniff it.”

“We’re here,” Patrick says, almost interrupting him. He turns on the spot, nods to himself. “This is the entrance. He… he’s in there.”

It doesn’t look anything different to Jonny, just one more patch of darkness among many, more corn, a droning voice in his ears.

“You sure?”

Patrick’s voice is tight, his eyes wide when he says, “Yes.”

“Ready?” he asks, because he’s not ready. He’s not. 

If Patrick could have touched him, Jonny thinks he would have at that moment, catching the aborted movement of his arm. “Why me, Jonny?” he says, low. “Why not Davey?”

Jonny swallows thickly, the same huge ball of sadness back in his throat every time he thinks about his brother, even after all these years. “He was only 9, Patrick. Besides, you know more about all this than he did and—”

“What?”

“I read that—I read that memories fade, even for ghosts. The longer you’re dead, the more you forget, and I didn’t—I couldn’t take the chance.”

What if he didn’t remember Jonny? Or himself? Playing pond hockey, street hockey, weekend holidays at the beach, building legos with his brother? All of it?

“Oh.”

What Jonny doesn’t say is how relieved he felt that there wasn’t really a choice in the end. That he wouldn’t have to choose between his best friend and his little brother. That he wouldn’t have to be selfish in one way or another. It was gonna be Patrick and he didn’t have to feel guilty about how happy that made him.

They stay silent for a moment, looking at each other. Jonny wishes he could kiss him. Wants to kiss him so bad. There’s been a last kiss heavy on his lips for two years. 

“I love you,” he tells him, quite simply, unplanned and sudden, but not surprised. He says it in the present tense because it doesn’t matter that Patrick’s a ghost, that The Harvester took him, Jonny still does love him, has never stopped. “I couldn’t tell you before… that night. I just—” He shrugs. He should have. 

“What changed?” Patrick asks, taking an extra step, close enough if he had a body, Jonny would feel the heat of it.

“You died.”

Patrick shudders, face twisting in pain and outline dimming for a second. Jonny cries out and reaches for him, and right through his chest. There’s nothing there. No lungs, no bones, no heart, no skin. Nothing.

He takes a few steps back and covers his face. The air is cool, verging on cold, and he takes huge gulps of it, the thick wet-soil smell of it sticking in his throat. 

When he lowers his hands, Patrick’s close again, closer than he was before. So close, he’s passing through Jonny a little. “Let’s go,” he says softly, eyes sad and tired. “Let’s finish this.”

Find the maze. Check.

◉

**3\. GET TO THE CENTER**

Nothing attacks them, nothing tries to stop them. There are no obstacles or traps or riddles to solve. 

“If no one can find the center without having done it before,” Patrick says as he turns a corner, out of sight for only a quick second but enough to send Jonny’s heart lurching and kicking. “Then how did I find it the first time?”

“He let you,” Jonny says with two large steps to get closer. “Showed you the way.”

“He chose me.”

“Yes.”

In Harvest Falls, no matter how cruel or painful or crazy the curse over their town is, the belief is that at the very least it’s fair. There is no buying your kids out of it, money and power mean nothing to The Harvester. All genders are taken equally, older or younger, pretty or not, good or naughty. Every single child in Harvest Falls between the ages of five and seventeen is affected by the Call, no matter what. And they _have_ to go. The Harvester makes sure of it.

There is no holding a child back who’s been Called. No tying him to his bed, or locking her up in the basement. The child will go or die trying. Every time. They will jump out of windows, bash their heads into walls, choke on their own tongues if they’re kept from it. Only one in hundreds gets taken. The cruel irony is that it’s simply safer to let them go.

The children of Harvest Falls learn that quickly. They learn not to resent their parents too much. 

“It’s not as random as we’ve thought. Not always anyway,” Jonny says. “And I don’t think the disease that plagued Black Hawk Creek was random either.”

“I don’t think so either.”

“I know.” Jonny smiles. “You’d figured that out already.”

“But not what it meant, if it meant anything.” Patrick shakes his head, disappointed in himself.

“Hey,” Jonny says softly, “tell me what’s at the center.” 

Patrick takes some time to answer, a shadow falling over his face. The corn is drooling with hunger, each brush of a dry leaf against Jonny’s body a lick from the tongue of a ravenous beast.

There’s a twisted sort of gladness in him at knowing the children lost in the maze can’t hear it. As the night goes on, they’ll sense it, somehow, but it will never be like the growling, gnawing, jaw-snapping sounds Jonny is hearing.

“A house,” Patrick says eventually and the corn quiets, as if listening. “A small house in a small clearing. Like a woodcutter’s cottage in fairytales.” 

He stares straight ahead, lost in his memories, but he keeps walking all the same, turning right and then left. His whole body knows where to go. It’s etched so deep inside him, even his spirit remembers.

“There was light in the windows, and smoke coming out of the chimney. It looked nice. It felt, I don’t know, safe, I guess. I thought, hey I’ll stay here, I’ll go home in the morning. But then the door opened, and it was like… a mouth. I remember thinking that it looked weird, but I couldn’t tell why. He was inside, I could tell. You know what you feel the closer you get to the end on Harvest Day? That voice in your head that scratches at your brain? It sounds like dry leaves under your feet in the fall. Fuck, I hate that noise. And it’s heavy and wet, like something breathing on the back of your neck.”

Jonny shivers. There’s almost no one in Harvest Falls who doesn’t know what Patrick means. Who doesn’t wake up from nightmares of it years and years later. Jonny used to entertain thoughts that he could escape it one day, but that died the night he woke from a bad dream and found his mom in the kitchen, all lights on and her hands shaking around a cup of tea. He didn’t ask why she was also awake. He didn’t need to.

“It was like that,” Patrick continues. “But worse. The house was his mouth and the light stretching over the ground was his tongue and I couldn’t stop myself from walking towards it. I wanted to stop but. I couldn’t. I couldn’t—I couldn’t stop and—And—”

“Patrick!” Jonny yells, panicked.

Patrick startles. One second his face is an ugly twisted thing made of terror, and the next it smooths out with surprise. It’s not his expression that had Jonny worried, though, but the way his ghost started to flicker like a dying lightbulb. 

What happens, he wants to ask, what happens if you remember too much? Do you disappear? The thought of losing Patrick a second time steals the breath from his lungs and he gasps on an painful inhale. 

They stare at each other with wide eyes. Jonny can see the corn through Patrick’s body, through his pupils.

“I think…” he starts, licks his lips. “I think maybe this is why ghosts forget.” God, he hopes David, wherever he is, has forgotten too. It’s unbearable to think about his little brother going through that horror. 

He’s glad for the familiar anger and hatred spiking in him again. The sting is wonderful. It reminds him of what he has to do.

“Jonny,” Patrick says, eyes searching his. “Jonny what are you gonna do? He’s… He’s…”

“He’s not a god,” Jonny says. And those are Patrick’s words. Words he’d written at the end of one of his notebooks. Underlined in red a few times. The Harvester is an old, immortal being but he is _not_ a god.

“Mommy?” says a little voice. Jonny and Patrick jump. 

It’s Eloise Proud. Her pants and shirt are dirty, her hair is in disarray, and there are tear tracks over her cheeks instead of a dazed smile, but otherwise she’s the same as the last time Jonny saw her, only a few hours ago. She’s tiny, so tiny.

“Jesus,” Patrick whispers, and Jonny remembers now how Patrick’s never been on this side of things before either. Never got the chance to be. 

Jonny kneels in front of her. She’s wearing a little coat, too, and it kills him to know her mom put her in it because she knew it would get cold tonight. She couldn’t keep her safe at home, but she could do that.

“Mommy’s not here.” Jonny zips up her coat with gentle fingers. He accidentally leaves blood over it where it’s still bleeding at his palm and tries to wipe it off. “She’s over there,” he lies, pointing back to where she came from.

Eloise runs her arm under her nose. “But I’m supposed to go there,” she says, raising a tiny finger to point in the direction Patrick and Jonny were going. Jonny breathes deep, shaky inside. He wants to scream. 

“No,” he says. “That’s a bad place. If you want to see mommy, you have to turn around. You have to… You have to run, okay? You have to run as fast as you can for as long as you can that way, and then mommy will be there. Do you understand?”

“It’s dark.” She sniffles. “I don’t like it.”

“I know. I’m scared of the dark too. But mommy will be there if you’re a brave girl, okay?” She nods, and Jonny’s insides twist a little at how small she is. A part of him just wants to pick her up and stick to her the whole night, but she can’t go where he’s going. And fuck, if he’s lucky, she may never have to and all this will be a bad dream she’ll eventually forget because she’s only 5. He turns her around by the shoulders and gives her a little push. “Go!” he says. “Run as fast as you can.”

She does, and is swallowed by the darkness almost immediately. When he stands up, Patrick’s beside him. 

“You know what’s always made me so angry?” he says, looking at the spot where Eloise disappeared. “I mean, besides the whole kid sacrifice thing. And dying.”

“What?”

“When he calls, you just feel so happy. You want to go so bad. You feel like you’re just about to start the best day of your life. Nothing is scary, nothing is bad. It’s pure euphoria. But it never lasts. It never fucking lasts. Once we’re stuck in the maze, he gives no fucks. You’re just scared and lost and cold.”

“It’s cruel,” Jonny says, the biggest understatement of the last two centuries.

“I think he feeds on it too.” Patrick looks at the path Eloise took again. “You’re gonna save her, Jon.”

Jonny shakes his head. “Not me,” he says. “David. My little brother is gonna save us all.”

Shocking Patrick has never been easy. He’s always been a quick one. Quick thinking, quick reactions, quick retaliation. It’s what made him such a good hockey player. It’s also why Jonny can’t help smiling a little, now, into his shocked, dumbstruck face. 

“What—?” Patrick starts. “Jon, what do you—”

“I can’t tell you.”

“No, seriously, what do you mean? What’s your plan?”

“No seriously, I can’t tell you,” Jonny says, and he leans forward so he can speak into Patrick’s ear and say as quietly as he can, “the corn is listening,” with his lips so close, if Patrick wasn’t a ghost, Jonny’s lips would be brushing the lobe of his ear.

And then they are.

The skin of Patrick’s ear is soft and dry under Jonny’s mouth. He bites on the lobe gently and smiles at Patrick’s soft gasp.

“Been wanting to do that for a long time,” he mumbles, nuzzles behind Patrick’s ear, his neck.

“Bite my ears?” Patrick says with what Jonny thinks was supposed to be a teasing tone, but turns out breathy and quick, excited.

“Yeah. I don’t know. Everything. I thought of everything.”

When Jonny pulls back and opens his eyes, Patrick’s looking at him, mouth parted and wet, puffs of air brushing Jonny’s cheeks. The light from the camping lantern casts warm highlights and shadows over Patrick’s skin, over the walls of the treehouse. 

Jonny presses his palm to Patrick’s cheek and it’s as smooth there as it looks, the weight of Patrick’s body over him steady and certain and nothing like the other times they’ve been similarly like this while play fighting or wrestling. This time, Patrick doesn’t move away. If anything, he settles himself better, more surely, between Jonny’s legs, tiny rolls of his hips that bring their groins in contact and make Jonny groan, switching his hand from Patrick’s face to clutch at his sweater.

“Been wanting to do _that_ for a long time,” Patrick says with a smile, tip of his tongue bitten between his teeth. Jonny surges forward to catch it with his own, to push past it and into Patrick’s mouth for another deep kiss, not the first now, but nearly. And not the last either, if he has anything to say about it. He’s waited so long for this. A long wait that started even before he was aware of it, the relief too big inside him to be contained so that the kiss is maybe a bit too biting, a bit too hard, a bit too sloppy. He should be worried about making it good, making it better than this, but he can’t think past how great it is already, how he doesn’t want it to change at all.

And Patrick isn’t complaining. In fact, he’s pushing back with as much force, tongue slick and hungry against Jonny’s, pressing so hard Jonny falls completely on his back. He takes Patrick with him, hand on the back of his neck until he’s splayed over Jonny’s body. Their cocks brush together through their jeans and they both gasp.

It’s cold out, but they’ve got a little space heater in here and between that and their bodies, the small space of the treehouse is toasty. Patrick is warm and solid over him, hard between the legs, and it’s so good, Jonny can barely think past that one thought.

“I swear this used to be bigger,” Jonny says, showing his meaning by kicking the opposite wall with his foot. He can’t even lie down straight in it anymore, feet dangling off the door if he were to stretch them. Instead he bends his knees, holds Patrick between his thighs. It would be so easy to spread them like this, or tip them up. To let Patrick in.

“You like, grew four inches this summer, or something,” Patrick grumbles, lips on Jonny’s jaw.

Jonny laughs and pats Patrick’s hair. “There, there, you’ll grow one day too, little hobbit.”

“Ah, fuck off.” 

Patrick makes to push off but Jonny grabs at his shoulders, brings hands up to his face. “Stay,” he says, and again with his lips brushing Patrick’s and something tight in his throat. “Stay.”

And it’s soon warm enough to take their sweaters off, their shirts. But not enough to keep from shivering when Patrick lowers himself back down over Jonny and their bare chests touch.

Jonny tips his head back against the floor with a, “fuck,” between his teeth. He didn’t think it’d be this much being with Patrick, that his skin would feel on fire, and touching him would make him this fucking hard. But it does and he is, and he curses again when Patrick’s mouth closes over one of his nipples, hand flying to the back of his head to keep him there.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah,” Patrick replies softly, breath blowing over the wetness he’s left and then flicking the hard nipple with his tongue. It makes Jonny twitch every time he does, little zings of pleasure sparking in his breastplate, between his legs where Patrick’s arm keeps brushing over his dick.

“Wait,” Jonny gasps. “Wait, I need—”

“What?”

He needs to catch his breath, he needs to—

“Jonny, you okay?”

He swallows past the rush of emotions jamming his throat. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, sorry. I…”

“Did you come already?” Patrick scrabbles back a little, looks down between their bodies like he expects to see Jonny’s jeans stained with his own jizz, and looks a weird mixture of relieved and disappointed when Jonny’s clearly still really really hard. Jonny laughs. It’s just Patrick, he thinks. It’s _finally_ Patrick. It’s Patrick Patrick Patrick the way Jonny has wanted him for so long, but also, it’s his dumb best friend who is too smart and quick and dumb and stupid all at once. Jonny has known him for practically all his life.

“I didn’t fucking come,” he says. “And I might never if you don’t fucking get back on my dick already.”

In retaliation, Patrick crushes his mouth to Jonny’s and grabs him between the legs with his hand, pressing hard enough Jonny can’t help the loud groan that escapes him, or the rush of affection that fills him at Patrick’s smug smile against Jonny’s mouth.

“It’s just me,” Patrick says, then kisses the corner of Jonny’s mouth gently, presses their foreheads together.

Far too fucking clever.

Patrick accidentally kicks both the space heater and the lantern while they try to shimmy out of their jeans, giggling against Jonny’s shoulder when Jonny’s jeans sort of, just a little, get stuck on his ass.

“I’d say you overdid the squats this summer, but I can’t fucking be mad about it,” he says, just before Jonny lies back down, dragging Patrick back over him in the process.

Feeling Patrick all naked over him is… a lot. Jonny’s got no word for it. Can barely comprehend that it’s happening.

“Oh fuck, that’s good,” Patrick whispers, and Jonny bends his knees again, clenches them over Patrick’s hips, their cocks sliding together. “Please tell me you’ll let me rub off on it,” he continues.

“What?”

“Your ass. Please let me rub off on it. Later.”

Jonny has to blink hard several times at the thought, feels himself spurt wet between them. “Oh shit, yeah. Fuck yeah. But.”

“Later.”

“Yeah.”

“Let me move,” Patrick says, and Jonny realizes he’s been tightening his hold on him with his legs, hot all over.

Patrick lifts himself up with an arm and gets his other hand between them. Jonny barely has time to enjoy the feel of his fingers wrapping around both their cocks when it’s gone. 

He groans. “What—”

“Lick it.” 

Patrick hold his hand in front of Jonny’s face and it’s easy it grab his wrist, to look him in the eyes while he licks at his palm and fingers. He makes it wet and sloppy and loves the way Patrick’s dick twitches and taps on Jonny’s belly with each drag of his tongue. 

“I’m gonna do that to your dick too,” Jonny says when he releases him, breathless and hot in his throat.

“Fuck yeah.” Patrick sounds as breathless as Jonny, eyes wide and dark in the low light. “But.”

“Later.”

“Yeah. Later. I want this now,” he says, getting his hand back where they both want it.

Jonny knew he’d like Patrick’s hand on his dick. For years, he’d imagined that the hand pulling at his cock wasn’t his own. But reality is ten times better. And better still when his dick slides against Jonny’s, fat and hard, both of them together too big for his hand.

Jonny lifts his head to glance between their bodies, sees how thick Patrick is, head of his dick red and wet at the tip. The sight—of it sliding against Jonny’s dick, of Patrick’s hand on both of them, of their naked stomachs and thighs and bodies so close together—makes Jonny flush hard. He feels the heat of it on his face and neck, down his chest. 

It’s so good but tips into not enough really fast. And Patrick must think the same because he groans with frustration and lets go, flattens himself over Jonny and starts a grind there, a frantic move of his hips, rubbing his dick over Jonny’s abs and causing Jonny’s to rub on his in the process. Patrick’s close enough to kiss now and Jonny stares at his lips, at his teeth biting the bottom one red and raw, for one second before he has to suck it out of Patrick’s bite. 

He tries to keep their mouths locked as Patrick ruts against him, hard enough Jonny has to plant a hand on the wall behind him and a foot on the opposite one to keep himself steady while Patrick brings them both off that way.

The space between them is already messy with spit and sweat and precome, but when Patrick comes, spurting wet and hard, teeth scraping Jonny’s jaw, the slide is slicker, even better.

“Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop,” Jonny keeps repeating, so damn fucking close he can feel the heat building in his eyes.

“Fuck you,” Patrick says, but doesn’t stop even as his body shakes. He keeps going until Jonny comes too, throws his arm around Patrick to hold him tight.

I love you, Jonny thinks. He doesn’t say it, but he feels it down to his bones.

They’re sticky and they stink and Jonny absolutely doesn’t care. 

They unroll their sleeping bags and zip them together so they can both fit, using their sweaters as pillows. They wake with the first rays of dawn.

Jonny moves his hand and accidentally brushes Patrick’s morning wood. He stills, but doesn’t remove his hand, lets the back of his fingers stroke gently. Patrick’s eyes are very blue in the early morning light. 

“Can—”

“If you’re about to ask me if you can do what you promised you’d do last night the answer is fucking duh, asshole.”

Jonny laughs and helps Patrick into his sweater so he can sit against the wall of the treehouse by the space heater while Jonny stays in the sleeping bag, stretching himself on his stomach. He bends down, brings his lips to Patrick’s hard cock, passes them slowly over the head and—

“Jonny!”

Jonny eyes snaps open.

The sky is dark overhead. No moon, no stars. So empty he has to close his eyes again, feeling dizzy. The air is cold over his heated face and there’s a sharp pain along his jaw. The corn’s growl sounds like a laugh.

The reality of where he is slams into him like a wrecking ball, and it has that effect too, all his insides scraped raw and run over and torn down. There’s blood in his mouth. 

“Shit,” he gasps, and it sounds wet to his own ears. He covers his face with his hands, the ground under him is hard, cold and unforgiving on his back. Now the corn really is laughing.

“Jonny?”

Patrick’s voice is close but Jonny can’t bring himself to look at him yet. He can still feel Patrick’s hands on his body, his lips on his, the softness of his cock on his mouth. The happiness there, lodged in his chest. How it felt real and unending. 

He wants to go back. Wants all of it back.

He yells, loud enough to scrape his throat, head tilted back, and hits the ground with his fists, before standing up with one strong push. “Motherfucker!” 

Patrick looks at him with wide, surprised eyes. Patrick who is only blue edges and soft shimmering light. Patrick who is dead, who is a ghost. And for one, bright, fiery moment of rage, Jonny _hates_ this Patrick. Hates him. The ‘get the fuck away from me’ almost escapes him, but he clenches his teeth on it. More blood fills his mouth and he spits it on the ground.

“What the—”

“I’m sorry,” Patrick says. “I had to hit you.”

What.

“What?”

“You just… fell!” Patrick says, spreading his hands wide to indicate the space where Jonny was lying a moment ago. “You wouldn’t wake up no matter how much I yelled, and I couldn’t touch you or shake you or…”

“Wait. Stop. Give me a moment.”

Jonny takes a deep breath. Part of him is still unmoored, still back in that treehouse. He brings his thumb to the wound in his hand and presses hard to make it hurt, to sharpen the world around him. 

There’s a bone sticking out of his hand.

Jonny furrows his brows and picks it out. It’s Patrick’s pinky bone, the one that was in his shirt pocket.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to explain,” Patrick says.

“Okay,” Jonny says. “Okay, what happened.”

Patrick steps closer, cautiously, like he’s worried Jonny’s not right, and frankly Jonny doesn’t blame him. He doesn’t feel right. He hasn’t felt right in a long time.

“You fell suddenly and I couldn’t wake you up,” Patrick repeats. “I didn’t know what to do. You were so fucking still, like you were dead except I could see you breathing. I was kneeling beside you and then I felt it under my hand, the bone.” He reaches out and picks it up between two fingers.

“What?” He’s definitely repeating himself. 

“I know! I couldn’t believe it. It must have fallen from your pocket. It’s the only thing I can touch. Maybe cause it’s mine.”

Patrick holds it up to peer at it with squinty eyes, like somehow he could divine its secrets by looking at it. But the only thing there is the rune Jonny’s carved in and Jonny’s blood.

“I shoved it in your hand,” he continues. “I thought maybe that would wake you up, you know, the pain of it. It wasn’t enough though, but you did twitch and move when I did it.”

“So what did you do?”

“I used this,” Patrick says, and turns around to pick something off the ground. He holds it up for Jonny to see. It’s a long white bone. “It’s my left femur.”

“Jesus.”

“I could feel it nearby. I can feel every single one of my bones. I couldn’t dig it out but I didn’t need to. I put my hand on the ground over it and it just… came to me. Like it wanted to…” Patrick trails off. 

“Wanted to what?”

“Come home.”

There’s a long silence that Jonny doesn’t know how to break. Doesn’t know what to say to the sadness in Patrick’s face. It’s cruel, it’s so goddamn cruel, that he’s dead and still feels so much. 

He touches his jaw. “So you hit me in the face with it?”

Patrick’s mouth ticks to the side, he bites the corner. “Yes. A few times. You… really didn’t want to wake up.”

No, Jonny really didn’t. Deep down, he still wants to be there. It pulls at him from somewhere inside him, tugs and calls and all he wants is to lie back down and fall back into it. He touches his jaw gingerly, winces at the sting. Now that he’s gotten more of his bearings, he realizes how sore his face is, can already tell it’s swelling.

“I’m sorry,” Patrick says again, softer, guilt all over him when he reaches with a hand for Jonny’s face. He retracts it before brushing Jonny’s skin. “I didn’t want to. I—”

“It’s okay,” Jonny says. And it’s not, it’s not okay. Nothing is. 

He tells Patrick, then, about the dream. “Actually, it wasn’t really a dream,” he says. “It was more than that. I was there. I was. Everything was real. And it was… it was that night. Together in the treehouse, before you—before Harvest Day. But… but there was no Harvest Day. I remember how I felt that night, how fucking happy I was to be there with you but scared out of my mind too.”

“Me too,” Patrick says, and Jonny now knows how much more scared than usual Patrick must have been. Little moments where he clung to Jonny in a way that felt like there was something he wasn’t saying. But Jonny ignored them, too wrapped up in his own fears and feelings. He knows now because he’s lived through it again without that fear, with nothing looming over them. He wants to cry at how unfair it is. 

“It wasn’t like that at all,” he presses on, clearing his throat. “It was like Harvest Day hadn’t existed at all. Just you and me and… it felt like a beginning, like something—I don’t know. It was perfect.”

Fury crosses Patrick’s face, eyes cold. “This goddamn motherfucker,” he says between his teeth. 

Jonny can only agree.

◉

Last year, Jonny thought he’d feel some relief at not being Called. He was finally free of it. Finally safe. But he was quick to realize that you were never free of Harvest Day. Never free of The Harvester. If you’re not worried about yourself, you’re worried about others, and that never changes. It’s maybe not a surprise, then, that the people of Harvest Falls soon came to think about Harvest Day as a curse, and not as a deal.

It hit Jonny hard, how trapped he truly was, when he watched Patrick leave that morning. After the blowjobs and more kissing. Patrick and his sisters always spent Harvest Day with their parents, so Patrick had to get dressed eventually, and Jonny had to say goodbye.

“I’ll wait here,” he said, his mouth on Patrick’s.

He stayed in the treehouse all day, reading comics, eating the sandwiches they’d made for themselves but got too distracted to eat. He’d stay here all day and all night until Patrick came back at dawn. And he’d kiss him some more and they would be together. He might be stuck in Harvest Falls but he’d have Patrick with him. 

At 4PM, close to Calling time, Patrick came back, hauling a box up the ladder and sliding it into a corner of the treehouse. 

“Don’t open it til I come back,” he said. Jonny’s name was on one of the flaps.

“What is it?”

Patrick shook his head, looked back over his shoulder and frowned. Hindsight is 20/20 and now that Jonny thinks about it, Patrick definitely looked scared, worried. And he should have asked, should have insisted, though he doesn’t know how he was supposed to guess that Patrick was scared for more reasons than it being Harvest Day. But he should have known somehow. He knew Patrick so well and he always did his best not to act too worried or afraid, mostly for his sisters’ sake, but even with Jonny sometimes. He should have insisted. But it was already too late, and Patrick was dashing up to give Jonny a quick kiss and dashing back down right after without a word.

Jonny stared at the box. Curiosity poked at his nerves, but he didn’t open it. And when Patrick didn’t come back, Jonny brought the box home with him, and he still didn’t open it. Not after Patrick’s name was added to the statue, not after his wake, not for days and days. It sat on his desk and every day, every night, Jonny stared at it. 

Patrick’d said to wait until he came back. 

After two weeks, he pulled the tabs open and took out the books and notebooks that were inside, the loose papers and scribbles, and he placed them beside the box. Then he went downstairs and found his mother in the living room, stood there silently until she looked up at him and he said,

“He’s dead. Patrick’s dead.”

She held him while he cried with his head in her lap, and petted his hair and face, making soothing noises that did not soothe him. Nothing could for a long time until he buried himself in Patrick’s research.

“Did you get a tattoo?” Patricks asks, startling Jonny out of his thoughts.

“What?”

“A tattoo,” he repeats, pointing at Jonny’s left arm where the shirtsleeve ripped. Through the tear, half-healed sharp black lines criss cross his wrist and disappear under his sleeve.

Jonny’s heart lurches and he covers it quickly with his hand, pulling on the sleeve to hide it. “No,” he says. “Just dirt.”

“But—”

He widens his eyes at Patrick in silent plea, and cocks his head towards the corn. Shut up shut up shut up, he thinks. Patrick raises his eyebrows but pinches his lips together. 

They must walk most of the night, but Jonny has no idea how long they really do. The clock on his phone still tells him it’s 10PM. 

“Are we getting close?” he whispers.

Patrick stops, looks around, picks a direction before replying, “Can’t you feel it?”

Yes, Jonny can: the mounting dread, the feeling of being boxed in. It gets darker even though it seemed like it was impossible just a moment ago. The itchy feeling of someone behind him, someone breathing down his neck, is almost unbearable. The smells in the air thicken, go from earthy soil and dead plants to something wetter, rotten. 

Jonny’s only felt it this bad maybe twice before, when he was young and lost in the maze, and it only occurs to him now how close he’d been those two times to being chosen. It’s sick to think he was lucky, when lucky means another kid had to die.

The glow of Patrick’s spirit fades a little but Jonny can’t tell if it’s because the darkness is getting inkier, murkier or if it’s like before, if Patrick’s fear is making it do that.

He stays close to him. He wishes he could hold his hand. 

It still takes them a long time to find the center. Long enough Jonny falls twice into another dream. He calls them dreams in his head because he doesn’t know what else to call them, but they’re more than that. They’re not visions either. They’re just life. They’re real in a way that life hasn’t felt in a long time. Real and happy and every single time he’s with Patrick. David is there. They live in Chicago, far from Harvest Falls. Far from any corn field. And Jonny’s happy. He’s _happy_. 

He wants to stay. Wants to sink into them and never let go. He wants this life so badly. Like he’s never wanted anything before except for David and Patrick to not be dead. 

He ends up bruised over the ribs on both sides from Patrick’s blows, from his efforts to wake Jonny up.

“You don’t want to wake up!” Patrick accuses him on the third time, when Jonny asks him if he really fucking had to go that hard, he thinks at least one of his ribs must be cracked. “You think I enjoy this?”

He’s spitting mad, but there are tears in his eyes and his hands are shaking. If he had any breath in him, he’d be panting with effort.

Jonny lets out a noisy breath through his lips and tries to shake off the dream.

“I could tie my knife to the bone so next time you can just stab me,” he says in what he thinks is a conciliatory tone. A small part of him wonders when stabbing started to feel like a reasonable alternative to things.

Patrick’s eyes flash. “Oh yeah, stabbing’s so much better.”

“Well, it’d be faster. Just aim for my right shoulder, not the left one.”

“Fuck you, I’m not stabbing you.”

Jonny still does it, opens his Swiss Army knife and ties it at the end of the bone with his shoelaces while Patrick glares. He stabs the ground a couple times to test it out and it holds.

They only avoid another argument about it because they turn a corner and suddenly they’re there. Just like that. 

The center of the maze. 

A little log house stands in a small clearing, exactly like Patrick described. Out of a fairytale. And for a moment Jonny believes what Patrick believed that day, that they’re safe from the night, from The Harvester, from the hungry, angry corn. There’s a warm glow coming out of the windows like a nice fire is burning inside and all you need to do is open the door, walk in, take off your shoes and sit down.

It lasts only for a moment. Jonny isn’t certain if it’s one last cruelty from The Harvester, to give that relief and immediately take it away. Or if it’s an attempt at an illusion, like a house made of candy, that just isn’t strong enough to hide the true nature of the being that lies in wait inside. 

And he waits, Jonny realizes, can feel it in every fibre of his being. He has been waiting all night for them to find him.

Get to the center of the maze. Check.

◉

**4\. BREAK THE DEAL**

“What does he look like?” Jonny asks with a small voice, eyes glued to the house. The door stays shut. Everything in him is telling him to run. Run far and fast and never stop. But he remains rooted to the spot, solid and stuck, vibrating only on the inside. 

His question is met with silence.

“Pat?” he says, swivelling on the spot. He finds only darkness and corn. No Patrick

Panic shoots through the fear. Is his time is up? Is he gone now that he’s done what Jonny brought him back for? Just like that? Without a goodbye?

The tightness in his throat expands, blocks his windpipe.

“Shit,” he says. “Shit, shit—”

He almost misses it, the faint blue glow against the corn stalks. He runs, back around the corner they had come from, and is so relieved to see Patrick there, sitting on the ground, he falls to his knees in front of him.

Patrick’s light is low, more an outline than anything else, the space in between more like tempered glass than a film of light.

“Sorry,” Patrick says, looking up, and Jonny reaches out, fingers sliding right through Patrick’s cheek. 

“It’s okay,” he says, soft, but still breathing hard. Patrick is shaking. “Patrick, you don’t have to come with me.” 

For weeks Jonny had thought of this night, but for weeks he also skirted around the question of Patrick’s ghost in his head, framing this whole thing as a solitary effort. Maybe he won’t even be able to talk, Jonny told himself. Maybe he won’t know who I am. Maybe he’ll be twisted and wrong and not himself. But now they’re here, and Patrick is here with him (it’s Patrick, ghost or not, it’s _him_ ), and it seems impossible to go into that house on his own. The thought alone makes him ill to his stomach. But perhaps not as much as it does Patrick, back to the place where he died, to the horrors he faced here. 

“You really don’t have to—”

“Don’t be a fucking hero,” Patrick says. “Of course I’m coming with you. Just. Give me a moment.”

Jonny frowns. “I’m not a hero.”

Patrick rolls his eyes, and his glow brightens. “You set out on your own to save a whole town. Pretty sure I’ve read stories about shit like that.”

“You started it.”

“I wasn’t the first.”

“Okay, exactly. It’s a team effort.”

Patrick snorts. “Fuck, forget what I said earlier, you haven’t changed at all.” And he’s smiling now, delighted and fond, if a little shaky. “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that, right?”

 _Go inside… go inside… go inside…_

Jonny startles, stands up and looks all around him.

“What?” Patrick says, standing up as well. “Corn talking again?”

“He knows we’re here.”

Patrick nods, rolls his shoulders. If he were alive he would probably swallow and take a deep breath, the way he did before jumping over the board for a shootout. But he’s not and Jonny says so.

“He can’t hurt you anymore,” he adds.

“He can hurt you,” Patrick replies.

Jonny thinks of his mother, awake in the middle of the night. He thinks of the dull look in his father’s eyes when one of his sons didn’t come home, how distant he’d become for such a long time, and still, not the man he used to be. He thinks of David, how he used to follow Jonny everywhere, how he loved hockey too, and dinosaurs, and He-Man. He thinks of Patrick, his best friend, and how in love with him Jonny still is. 

He shakes his head. “He can’t take anything else from me.”

Patrick’s hands goes through Jonny’s arm, and Jonny closes his eyes for a second, imagining he can feel it. 

“Don’t be so ready to die, Jon.”

“I’m not. I just don’t think dying will hurt more than losing you.”

It hangs between them, that raw piece of Jonny’s heart. He didn’t say all the things he wanted to say, back then in the treehouse and even before that, too worried or scared, protecting himself, but what does it matter now, at the end like this. 

They look at each other for a long time, until Patrick’s face softens and he smiles, eyes crinkling at the corners. “I love you,” he says. 

Jonny takes a deep, shaky breath. “You’re dead.”

“And I still feel so much. So much, you have no idea. Maybe more. This,”—he gestures between them—“is what called me back. It’s what woke me up. It’s what binds us.”

Jonny’s lips quirk. His heart beats fast. “You mean I emotionally beat you up with a bone.”

“Yeah,” Patrick laughs. “Yeah you did.”

“I wish I could kiss you.”

“Me too.”

They must be quite the picture: tall, dark boy—dirty clothes, bloody hand, and bruises swelling all over the side of his face—facing his ghost-boyfriend. 

“I don’t know what’ll happen,” Patrick says. “I don’t know how long I can stay, but I’ll stay for as long as I can.”

Jonny nods. “Let’s finish this.”

“For Harvest Falls.”

“For David. For you.”

◉

The door to the house doesn’t open on its own the way it had for Patrick, but it does easily when Jonny reaches for the handle and pulls.

For the space of a blink, everything goes black, darker than the sky above. But before Jonny has time to start panicking, to get more than a, “What—” it recedes and the room comes into focus. He blinks hard into the new light. They’re inside without Jonny remembering he took a step. The house, it seems, did it for them. 

The space is exactly what the outside suggests, if you came upon it anywhere else, on any other night: one room, warm wood, thick beams along the ceiling, a large fireplace made of stones, with a roaring fire in its grate and chairs piled with furs and blankets beside it. 

Standing in the corner is The Harvester.

Jonny’s eyes clock on him immediately, the coziness of the room becoming sharply terrifying by his presence in it. It seizes at Jonny’s insides with sharp claws and twists. 

The Harvester grins and Jonny has never been more afraid in his life. 

He had asked Patrick what he looked like, and never got an answer, but no description could have really prepared him for this.

The Harvester is tall. Taller than any human but not so tall he touches the ceiling, and he is terribly skinny. Thin as a scarecrow. It should be hard to tell with his inky black clothes. They flow into the shadows of the room, shift with the light of the fire, merge with his long black hair. But even through that dark, moving mass, can tell that The Harvester is mostly bones and skin stretched tight. Something confirmed when he raises a thin hand. His fingers are long, twig-like, and pointy, the middle one as long as Jonny’s forearm. They have too many knuckles, round and thick like the knots in a bare tree branch. 

He waves at the chairs. They’re as inviting as an electric chair. 

His skin is pale grey like death, sickly and thin. He wears a wide, grey cloth over his eyes so that his face is mostly mouth. For all his bones and angles, his mouth is the sharpest thing about him. It spreads too wide for his face, too high over his knifelike cheekbones, as if someone slit the corners the ears and then filled the new space with teeth. His lips are as thin and grey as his skin, but his tongue, when he licks them, is dark red like blood. 

If he looked all monster, or all human, Jonny could endure it better than this warped in-between. His brain can only scream in horror. 

_Sit_ , The Harvester says. 

Jonny expected his voice to be as reedy as the whole of him, but it’s deep and rich and cold like soil, like a catacomb. It doesn’t come out his mouth but from the whole room, the walls themselves, and it resonates as if they’re already standing in his throat. 

The Harvester’s smile is all predator. His teeth are white like bones bleached by the sun, and sharp like razors. Jonny counts at least four rows of them. 

Keeping his eyes on him, Jonny picks the chair closest to the fire, as much in the light as he can be. He catches the flicker of Patrick’s glow beside him. The Harvester waits for them to settle before taking the seat in front of Jonny. The fire is large and bright, but its light doesn’t reach him, is absorbed in the folds of his clothes. He is only shadows and bones and maw.

Oh god, Jonny thinks, unable to look away. Oh god, I’m going to die. 

“You haven’t aged a day,” Patrick says to break the silence, probably not as confidently as he means it, but still with a tone of sarcastic geniality that shakes Jonny out of his stupor, shocks a sudden and short lough out of him.

The Harvester cocks his head. _Patrick_ , he says, and licks his lips, a slow and deliberate swipe. 

It’s a terrible thing, Patrick had said, to be devoured.

“It’s good to be remembered, at least,” Patrick says and Jonny realizes with a jolt that he’s buying Jonny some time, giving him a chance to get his bearings, to steady himself.

 _It was a good year._ The Harvester’s mouth widens into a razor-sharp smile. 

His eyes—if he has any under his blindfold—might be covered, but Jonny has the distinct impression that The Harvester is looking at him. He straightens himself in the chair, clears his throat, and says, “There won’t be another one,” as firmly as he can.

Here we go.

The silence is heavy, even the fire seems to hold its breath. Another movement of his head, owl-like, and if Jonny wasn’t certain that The Harvester was looking at him earlier, he would be now. The force of his attention presses on his skin like a hand around his throat. 

_Oh?_

“You are not a god,” Jonny says. The only words that had brought Jonny any hope over the months, repeated over and over and over: he is not a god, he is not a god, he is not a god.

_I am immortal._

“But you are not a god.”

_I came into the night when the first men tilled the first field, planted the first seeds, harvested the first wheat. I am what grows in the dark, what eats and has been eaten. I feed the world and the world feeds me._

“Yeah, yeah,” Jonny says, waving a dismissive hand, leaning hard into the spark of confidence inside him: he has spent days and nights in The Harvester’s fields and learned to talk to the corn; he has raised the ghost of his best friend with the pain of his memories; he has bled; he has woken from cursed dreams he didn’t want to leave; and he has uncovered The Harvester’s secrets. “You aren’t like us, but you are _of_ us.”

_What do you know of ancient, ageless things, little, fragile human?_

From the corner of his eye, Jonny catches Patrick stepping closer to him, thigh half swallowed into the armrest of Jonny’s chair. “I don’t know what you are,” he says, and ignores the smug grin that gets him. “There are no names for beings like you, only the ones we give you. I know you’re not the only one, I know you’re not alone, and I know you are bound by the rules of your kind. Rules that should not be broken.”

_You do not know what you speak of._

“Maybe,” Jonny agrees. “You can’t take without being given. It’s humans who woke you into existence. So you made a deal with the people of Black Hawk Creek two hundred years ago—a binding agreement—and you have broken you word. You have broken the deal. It’s over. The deal is done. You will not take another child from us. Not tonight, not ever again.”

Everything stills, even the fire. Jonny holds his breath, heart pounding hard in his chest, blood pumping in his ears. He can’t even blink. 

The Harvester doesn’t move for a long, long time, but his fury is tangible. It rushes at Jonny’s body, presses into the grooves of his skin, like microscopic nails digging in ready to tear him apart. But there must be uncertainty or curiosity in him as well, because The Harvester moves imperceptibly and the flames in the hearth start moving again. Beside him, Patrick cries out, low, flexing his hands. Jonny hadn’t realized that he had gone still with all the rest.

_The deal is still strong._

“The deal is broken,” Jonny repeats. “You broke it 9 years ago when you took my brother.”

◉

When The Harvester—then nameless though he had been The Devourer, The Shadow King, The Mouth of Many Teeth, and dozens of other names before—sealed his deal with the people of Black Hawk Creek, he sealed it in blood. Old things understand blood the most. It feeds them. Blood is life and what is more alive than something who cannot die.

All the Black Hawk Creek townsfolk, from baby to infant to elderly, poured some of their blood into a bowl that The Harvester then drank. He drank it slow and deep and licked the bowl afterwards. 

_A child of this blood_ , The Harvester said. _Every year._

“It was pretty smart of you not to put a deadline on the whole thing, and pretty fucking stupid of the Black Hawk Creek people to not ask for one. But then again, you kinda caught them at their lowest, didn’t you? When all that was left in them was desperation,” Jonny says.

The Harvester smiles again. His red tongue flicks out, wet and shiny over his colorless lips, like he’s salivating at the memory of that night. He is only hunger, Jonny remembers reading in one of the journals Patrick had found. Hunger and tricks.

_And so it has been, ever since._

“No. My brother and I aren’t of this blood. You took a child that wasn’t yours to take.”

His words drop between them less like a gauntlet and more like a sentence, a gavel on its block. Jonny clenches his jaw and narrows his eyes. 

“Oh, snap!” Patrick exclaims, always a bit cocky when he’s on edge, so familiar, it makes Jonny braver. I’m so glad you’re here, he wants to tell him. Whatever happens, I’ll never regret that. 

The Harvester stays silent, but the shadows around him grow and engulf everything except for Jonny and Patrick.

Jonny digs his fingers into the armrests of his chair. “My mother was adopted,” he continues. “My grandparents wanted a child so badly it was eating at them until it was the only thing they could think about. Is that something you do too? Make that desire grow inside us so we keep having the children you need? The same way no matter how much we try to leave, we always feel compelled to come back?”

_Humans are weak and liars. They cannot be trusted to hold their part of a bargain. If not kept in check, they will always break it. A contract with me is binding._

“Yeah, but pretty sure you didn’t tell them all that when you made the deal right?” Patrick says. “Kinda withheld some of those supernatural footnotes, didn’t you?”

_All they had to do was ask._

“They were dying! They were hopeless.” Jonny exclaims. “You made sure of that.”

Another smile.

This has always been the mistake of humans, to think they are the cleverest of creatures, and that all intelligent beings think like them. But The Harvester isn’t human, and he doesn’t think like them. His rules aren’t human rules; his logic, human logic; his sense of fairness or fair play either doesn’t exist or exists on a completely different axis. There are stories all over the world of humans making deals with otherworldly beings, and Jonny has read countless of them. Most of them end badly, but once in a while, even the Devil can be tricked back. 

“My grandparents were smart,” he continues. “I don’t think they really knew why or how, but they thought, if we adopt, if we take a child into our home that isn’t born from us, maybe that child will be spared. That’s what they confessed to my mother in their old age.”

“But it didn’t work,” Patrick says. “Your mom was definitely Called when she was a child.”

For the first time since they entered The Harvester’s house, Jonny wrenches his gaze away from him to look at Patrick. As soon as he does, something unclenches inside him, and the dread recedes a little. Patrick’s edges look bright gold in the firelight. 

“You figured it out,” Jonny says. “Don’t you remember? You thought of it first.”

Patrick’s eyes search his, and Jonny wishes they were blue like they were before, but he grins a little all the same when Patrick’s mouth parts and understanding flashes over his face.

“The spells aren’t the same.”

Jonny nods. “The spells aren’t the same.” He turns back to The Harvester. “The Call and the sacrifice aren’t bound by the same magic.”

 _It was their condition_ , The Harvester says. And there’s something in his voice that Jonny can’t pinpoint, some kind of apprehension, like he’s slowly realizing that he might have really fucked up. Jonny clenches the armrests harder.

“The Black Hawk Creek elders knew they couldn’t be trusted to be impartial in choosing a child. They knew they wouldn’t be fair, that corruption would happen. That poor children would pay the price. Girls more than boys. Infants more than healthy older children who could help the household already, that had been loved for longer. So you created what we name The Call at their demand.”

“Again without telling them everything, though,” Patrick says. “The fucking sheer terror it fills you with all night, for example.”

_Bones that have known terror are more delicious._

“Oh, fuck you.”

Jonny ignores them and pushes forward. “The spell sits on the town. Any child between 5 and 17 within it will respond to it. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? It’s a mark. If you’re touched by it when you’re five, you’ll answer to it no matter how far your parents take you on Harvest Day, and then die trying to get back. After several years of that, people just learned to deal instead. They stopped trying to find a way out. It’s sad to know that if they had taken their child out of the town’s limits _before_ they were ever touched by that first Call, and then every year after, they could have maybe avoided it. But after two hundred years, people just think it is how it is. We are very good at enduring.”

Jonny doesn’t know anything about magic. This is more a guess made up of what he’s found, what Patrick has found, and what he’s learned from a lifetime of living in Harvest Falls. He can’t even call it an educated guess because he might be applying human logic where human logic doesn’t apply. He waits for The Harvester to confirm or deny anything he’s said, but is only met with silence. The Harvester is, however, not smiling anymore.

“You were careful though, as well,” Jonny pushes on, “to keep your word. Your part of the bargain. There are never visitors to the town, not even distant cousins, when Harvest Day comes around. Only Black Hawk Creek children. Only Harvest Falls children. Linked by blood to those first people you made your deal with. Except for my mom. Except for me. Except for my brother who you took 9 years ago and who wasn’t yours to take because my mom married an outsider and none of us are Black Hawk Creek blood. What was it? Blood got too thin you couldn’t taste it anymore? You thought it wouldn’t matter? But you took him and when you did you broke the deal. It’s done. It’s over!”

By the end, Jonny is screaming. He feels tears of anger and loss in his eyes and clenches his jaw, clenches his fists, clenches everything inside of him so that they do not fall, because he isn’t done yet. His left arm itches terribly again and for once Jonny’s glad for it. He focuses on that itch. On what he has to do. 

The Harvester’s eyes are hidden but they bore inside Jonny all the same. All his shadows are still. The only sound between the three of them is the crackling of the fire, until,

“Give them back.” Patrick voice is soft but carries into the silence. The Harvester’s head turns in his direction, and so does Jonny’s. Patrick’s face is fury and determination. Jonny has never seen him like this. “Give. Them. All. Back,” he says through clenched teeth.

_Who?_

“The children that weren’t yours to take. Jonny’s brother and everyone after him because you broke your word and none of them were yours after that. Give them back. David, Louisa, Marguerite, Jan, Sylvie, Peter, Olive, and…” 

“Alexandra,” Jonny says automatically, the name of the girl who died last year after Patrick. He had no idea Patrick had learned their names as well.

“And Alexandra.”

_And you?_

“Yeah, asshole, and me. We were not yours to take. Give us our lives back.”

Oh shit. 

Jonny hadn’t thought of that. 

For all his planning, his research and his magic, for the tattoo safely hidden under his shirt, he hadn’t thought of that. He assumed he could only ask for it to be over, for it to be done. Asking for more hadn’t crossed his mind at all. That somehow he could have them back. David. And Patrick.

He stares at Patrick with wide eyes. Stares at the perfect line of his nose, upturned at the tip, and the sheer anger and determination in his eyes, and he shakes inside. A vibration that starts in his rib cage and spreads and blooms, excited and hopeful. 

It’s hard to stop it, to push it back into something small and negligible, locked as far away from his heart as possible. Because, _god_ , he knows right away the pain would be unbearable if he let himself truly believe it could happen, even for a moment, just for it to be taken away. But it’s there all the same, if small, a bright spark. 

“You broke your word,” Patrick says, glaring at The Harvester. “You took what wasn’t given. Give back the lives you stole.”

It’s a gamble. Jonny’s whole plan is a bit of a gamble. They know so little about The Harvester, about what he is bound by. About old beings, from old times, with old rules and old minds and old ways, who understand shadows and sun, bones and death and blood, and where a vow is a contract that lasts generations. And maybe it’s even surprising that they could find as much as they did, living in a small town in the middle of nowhere, inevitably unable to leave for too long. Or maybe not. Live two centuries in a place occupied by one of these entities, and some people are bound to go looking. 

But they’re grasping at straws. Patching up the holes in their knowledge with human logic, negotiating with something that isn’t human at all.

“They were not freely given,” Jonny repeats. It’s something he read in a journal Patrick had found, some loose pages from someone who was a child when the deal happened so long ago, and it feels like the most crucial detail in all this. Otherwise, why make a deal, why not just take a child whenever hungry?

_They were._

Jonny shakes his head. “Under false pretenses. Under the assumption that the deal remained unbroken. But it wasn’t. You broke it. _You_ broke it.” Maybe if he says it enough, it will work. Jonny has nothing left but that. That and the secret inked into his left arm. 

Everything hinges on the consequences of breaking a deal being bad enough that The Harvester will have to relent. But the truth is, Jonny has no idea if they are. He just had to do something. He had to try. 

“Fucking give me my life back!” Patrick yells. 

The shadows swell.

They surge in and The Harvester is only a white flash of teeth when he sneers, his tongue a bloody gash, before the room is covered in darkness. The air in the cabin is putrid over Jonny’s skin, slick and pungent, and he knows then, he knows he’s about to be eaten. He has a brief thought for his parents, for the letter he left them on his bed. Guilt twists at him. I tried, he thinks. Mom, dad, I really tried.

Something sharp slashes his right arm and he cries out at the pain, feels his skin split and bleed. He thinks he hears Patrick call his name and he wants to call back, wants to turn towards him, to see him one last time, but he’s rooted to the chair, pressed into it by the shadows. He can barely breathe. He clenches his left fist and raises his arm, waiting for the bite with sharp satisfaction. There’s a roar in his ears that he can’t decide is his or The Harvester’s, a dry slither through the noise like corn leaves brushing together in a storm. 

And then he’s back. Back in the cabin and still in the chair. The fire lights up the whole room. The shadows have retreated where they belong behind The Harvester, and further than that, almost normal. 

Jonny’s scream is suddenly the only noise and he snaps his teeth on it with a click, throat raw. He doubles over, forehead on his knees, panting hard and fast like he’s been triple shifted. 

“Patrick?” he gasps, trying to catch his breath.

“I’m still here,” Patrick says to his right, voice as raw as Jonny’s. “But Jonny I—”

It’s then Jonny realizes that the panting in his ears isn’t only his own. 

“Patrick!”

And he is there, he is _there_. Flesh and blood, the whole of him in fucking technicolor. Hair blond but dark with sweat clinging to his skull, skin flushed red with exertion, bent down with hands on his knees like he’s run miles and miles and miles and miles. Back to his body. Back to Jonny.

He doesn’t realize he’s gotten up until he has Patrick in his arms. Solid. Solid in his arms and, oh god, breathing too. Breathing and alive. Jonny can feel his _heart_. Patrick’s heart beating against Jonny’s chest, fast and hard. Breath wet into Jonny’s neck. Fists clenched into Jonny’s shirt. Touching him. Touching Jonny. One sob escapes Jonny, sudden and raw, muffled into Patrick’s shoulder, into his sweater—Jonny’s sweater given before he left. “So I’m with you in some way,” he’d mumbled handing it to Patrick. “I want it back.”

“Oh god,” Jonny gaps. “Oh my god. Patrick.”

“Sorry it took so long,” Patrick whispers, squeezing Jonny tight.

Break the deal. Check.

_I have made reparations._

Jonny startles. They both let go of each other, though Patrick stays close, shoulder brushing Jonny’s when he turns around. He runs his forearm over his mouth, his eyes, winces at the gash there. Fuck, he hurts everywhere. 

“Where are the others? Where’s my brother?”

_They will find their way home when the sun comes up._

“How do we know—”

_DO NOT TEST ME!_

The house shakes and shudders. The shadows leap forward and slap at Jonny’s skin, hit at the bruises along his jaw and ribs, harsh pokes at the wounds on his arm and hand, and Jonny bends over and cries out.

“Motherfuck—” he says through clench teeth. 

_Leave._

“You leave,” Patrick gasps beside Jonny, still trying to catch his breath. “Leave and never come back, asshole.”

The Harvester’s mouth stretches into a smile, wicked and stinging. It widens, and widens, opens up across his face and then beyond it, jaw distending, monstrous and grotesque. 

_I have not fed tonight_ , he says, voice everywhere. _And you have come willingly._

“Been there done that,” Patrick replies bravely, pressing closer to Jonny all the same. 

But The Harvester isn’t talking to Patrick. This is it, Jonny thinks. He glances at Patrick, heart clenching, then squares his shoulders, tips his chin up. 

“I have,” he says 

“Jonny?”

“Will you have me and leave us alone for good?”

“What the fuck?”

Jonny keeps his eyes on The Harvester and his widening maw. He takes a few steps away from Patrick, too afraid to look at him. If he does he might not go through with it. If he does, The Harvester will know. Hands grab him from behind and Patrick is yelling his name, but his grip is still weak, and it’s easy to shrug him off.

The Harvester’s mouth is a cavern. Inside, Jonny can see six, seven rows of teeth, and he has the distinct impression that they don’t stop there. Teeth all the way down, he thinks. This is gonna hurt like hell. His whole body wants to run in the opposite direction. 

_YESSSSSSSS_

The wet hungry red gash of his mouth now big enough for a child, for a young boy, for Jonny. Coming for him, coming to eat him whole.

Jonny braces a foot behind him, as much to take the impact of it, as to stop himself from running. Maybe if he moves to the side at the last second he can get the timing right and—

The Harvester yells in pain, a high screech like a slaughtered pig, and Jonny glances up, past the upper mandible and its rows of teeth, to black blood spewing from his eye where Patrick’s stabbed him with Jonny’s knife.

“Jonny run!” he screams from his perch on the high chair. 

“Patrick, no!”

It happens in slow motion: The Harvester’s mouth starts shrinking as he turns towards his assailant, Patrick falls off the chair’s back, onto the seat, onto the floor, and Jonny sees his window of opportunity closing.

He runs. He has to time it just right, early enough he can slip in there, but not so soon that The Harvester could stop biting down and—

There. Now.

Jonny shoves his left arm into The Harvester’s mouth.

◉

**5\. KILL HIM DEAD**

When he thought about this moment, he imagined himself saying something cool like, “Choke on this, motherfucker.” Or, “YOU ARE NOT A GOD!”

In reality, he doesn’t even _think_ any of it. Nothing crosses his mind past the excruciating pain of shoving his arm deep into the mouth of a monster, into rows and rows of razor-sharp teeth. They lacerate at his skin and muscles and then shut down with a heavy weight, right up to his shoulder.

For one brief moment, through the blinding agony, he feels it all: his skin gnawed, his bones ground, his muscles and veins torn. It’s only the instinct of needing to get away from it all that makes him wrench his body backwards. He falls on his back against the hard floor of the cabin.

There’s so much yelling he can’t tell who it’s coming from—him, or Patrick or The Harvester. Probably all of the above. Screams of pain and anger and fear. And it hurts, it’s agonizing, his left shoulder is on fire. Something sticky spreads under him but he can’t lift his arm to check what it is. His arm won’t—his arm. 

Hands are on his face. He blinks. Patrick’s face is in front of him, but blurry like he’s seeing him through tears. His lips are moving but Jonny can’t hear him. 

What? He wants to say, but his mouth isn’t done screaming. 

He can’t hear Patrick through the pounding of blood in his ears and the shaking, deafening howl around them. Past Patrick’s shoulder he sees darkness moving, shadows twisting together like a tornado, raging against the walls of the cabin. The ground jolts and convulses under this back, slats of wood come undone, and it shoots more pain into his shoulder, so that he rolls onto his other side in an effort to get away from it. 

Patrick flattens himself over Jonny’s body and holds his head. Jonny realizes dimly that it had been banging on the floor only because it’s not anymore. 

“What did you do?” he yells in his ear.

It’s pure torture but Jonny manages to wrap his right arm around Patrick’s waist. “Runes,” he says, through clenched teeth, though he has no idea if Patrick can hear him. “And bone, and blood.”

“Your arm!” Patrick yells again, and his arms tighten even more around Jonny as the cabin is torn asunder.

“It has—” Jonny starts, and he licks his lips, his throat wet and tasting of blood. He doesn’t know if the world is dark or if he’s fading. “It has to cost something.”

◉

He only learns of what happened next days later.

Of the cabin and the maze disappearing around them in what had felt like an eternity to Jonny, as he lay in torment on the ground, but only lasted a few minutes in reality. Of Patrick then dragging his body to the edge of the field, and how some of the older children who had spent the night in the fields had helped him.

Of Jonny being rushed to the hospital and how in the chaos that ensued it took the people of Harvest Falls a long time to realize that the boy clinging to Jonathan Toews was the one who had died two years before. And that all the children were accounted for at roll call, not one missing. In fact, eight more were there. Eight children with their names on the statue in the center of town.

Later, he thinks he would have liked to be there to see David first. To apologize to his parents. To spare Patrick the task of telling the mayor, the Harvest Falls paper, everyone, what had happened and what it meant.

The only thing he thinks he remembers from those unconscious days in his hospital bed, is a small hand holding his, and his brother’s voice calling his name.

◉

Jonny wakes in the hospital from dreams of corn hallways whispering, _Get out… get out… get out..._ , and infinite dark skies where a ceiling should be, feeling boxed in anyway, pressed towards the Earth like a great, invisible hand is slowly crushing him. He wakes with a gasped, strangled scream in his throat.

The room is fuzzy and unfocused, his vision hazy, gives everything a soft edge, a glowy, bright look of white and beige.

The first thing he hears is the beeping of a monitor. Then, from far away as if underwater, his name. 

“Jonny.”

And it’s Patrick. It’s Patrick calling his name. There are soft fingers over his and he turns his head towards the sound, towards the touch there.

And it’s Patrick. It’s Patrick holding his hand.

It’s Patrick.

I thought you were dead, he thinks.

The memories slam into him like a freight train, and he cries out. He can’t feel any pain right now, but his mind remembers it and it flies at high speed through his whole body, an all too-real ghost, down to his toes and into… nothing. 

His left arm is gone.

His left arm is _gone_. 

Kill The Harvester. Check.

He hears a distressed sound and it takes him a moment to realise it’s coming from him. Patrick squeezes his hand on his right and Jonny tells himself to look, turn his head to the left and look, but he can’t. He can’t. He can’t bear to see what isn’t there. So he looks at Patrick instead, at his hand holding Jonny’s.

He thought he’d never get to do that again. 

Patrick squeezes harder and Jonny wonders if he’s saying any of this out loud or if Patrick really knows him that well or if it’s just a fever dream, all of this.

“I’m here,” Patrick says, fingers pressing into Jonny’s palm and then up his arm, harder in the crease of his elbow, and up to his shoulder until they glance Jonny’s jaw. “You brought me back.”

He didn’t. That was Patrick’s idea. But then he watches the creases over Patrick’s face and the dark circles under his eyes, and thinks maybe Patrick should tell his face to be happier about it. He tries to reach over with his left arm to smooth the line between Patrick’s eyebrows with his thumb but of course, he can’t. There’s nothing to move. He’s got no arm. 

He laughs. He laughs with a broken, dry sound, throat parched. Laughs when Patrick’s face goes from weary and concerned to confused.

“I used to think,” Jonny starts, words heavy and sticky in his mouth. “That I missed you like a limb. Like you being gone was like losing a limb, and now I really am missing one.” 

He cough-laughs, the hilarity of it all stuck up inside his tired chest, and very much lost on Patrick it seems, what with the way he says, “Jesus,” and lets go of him, rubs a hand over his face and gets up. “Jesus Christ, Jonny.”

He’s looking to the side, out the window. Sunlight hits the line of his profile and he is beautiful, his Patrick, always has been. Jonny’s heart clenches with it, and he wants to tell Patrick that, but he’s moving around the bed, towards the door.

Panic cracks wild in Jonny’s chest, sharp even through the anesthetic, and he cries out, a sound he’s never heard himself make before. Patrick stops but doesn’t come back, only turns his head to the side, his back rigid, his shoulders tense.

Since when, Jonny thinks, did you ever mind breaking down in front of me? But what he says is, “Don’t go,” soft and pleading, childish and scared. “I’m tired,” he adds, swallows past the lump in his throat. “I’m so tired of being the one left behind.”

◉

“There was so much blood,” Patrick whispers. He sits at the head of the bed, chin on Jonny’s pillow, lips close to his ear, and Jonny hums tiredly, rolls his head to the side so it’s leaning against Patrick’s. “You had started to turn grey. But when we got here, after… after they said you were gonna be okay, the doctor said you hadn’t lost nearly as much blood as you should have.”

He slides his fingers into the loose collar of Jonny’s hospital gown, over his collarbone, and Jonny doesn’t have to look down to know what he’s touching, the tattoo there still fresh and sensitive.

“Yeah,” Jonny whispers back. “That helped.”

There’s a long silence, and then, “Explain.”

Beep goes Jonny’s monitor. Boom goes his heart. Patrick flattens his hand over it.

“Found a book,” he says, smacking his lips and clearing his throat. It’s still so damn dry. His thoughts are slow, words hard to catch in his brain. “It had… stuff. Spells, I guess. Ancient runes. Used one to call your ghost.”

“And your arm?”

“Kill him. Or maybe just… banish him. Into the void, it said. Got it done recently, wrist to shoulder. Itched like crazy.”

“Runes.”

“And bone. And blood.”

“Couldn’t you—I don’t know. Buy meat? Like, a cow or something?”

“A cow.” Jonny is too tired to laugh, can feel the morphine pulling him back under, but he smiles. “And what? Hide it under my shirt?”

Patrick huffs, but then adds, softer, “It has to cost you something.”

“Yes.” Jonny closes his eyes against the images flashing in his mind.

“And these?” Patrick taps his breastbone. 

“So I don’t bleed to death,” Jonny says, rolling his head some more, nose squished against Patrick’s hair. He takes a deep breath. “So I don’t get poisoned. Thought they’d help with the pain, but.” Not so much.

“Oh.”

Patrick’s fingers are soft and gentle over his skin, at his throat, as much a lull as the painkillers.

“Please don’t leave,” he hears himself say before falling under again.

◉

Jonny cries when he sees his brother for the first time in 9 years. His little brother who used to annoy him by following him around everywhere and for whom Jonny would have given literally everything to be annoyed by again. Over and over until the end of time if possible.

He’s still groggy and full of painkillers but he stretches out his good arm—his only arm—and lets David climb onto the hospital bed so he can hug him in a way they hadn’t done in some time even before David died, both of them too old, being 9 and 11 and all grown up. 

Jonny’s 20 years old now, but his brother is still 9. He feels so much smaller than Jonny remembers, pressed against his much larger body while Jonny cries and cries and cries, David’s fists clenched into his hospital gown, randomly petting Jonny’s face at times with some, “Hey Jonny, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Jonny just holds on to him tighter.

When he’s empty of tears, and he’s calmed down, David pulls back and smiles at him. Jonny brushes the hair off his forehead. He hasn’t changed. Hasn’t changed at all.

“It’s good to see you, buddy,” he says.

“Mom and dad say I’ve been gone a long time, but it doesn’t feel that way to me.”

“I’m glad,” Jonny says with a lump in his throat. “It wasn’t the same without you.”

David gives him a face like _Of course it wasn’t_ and Jonny snorts, then winces.

“You’re older,” David whispers, eyes flitting over Jonny’s face. Jonny touches his cheek. He can’t stop, can’t believe he’s really there.

“I am.”

David frowns, pats Jonny’s chest. “You’re really big now.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s weird.”

It would be funny if not for the confusion there, like he can’t decide if he likes it or not, can’t understand why his big brother is so much older, so much bigger, so different than what he remembers. 

“I’m sorry,” Jonny says, soft. “It’s still me.”

Jonny’s dad picks David up and puts him back down beside the bed. “Let’s go grab some food so Jon can rest, okay?” he says.

David nods and gives his dad a hug in a way Jonny doesn’t remember him really doing before, and he thinks David’s definitely picking up on their feelings and how much they’ve missed him and want him close even though he doesn’t really understand why or feel the same way. His father rubs a hand over David’s back and bends down to kiss his hair. 

Before leaving the room, David turns back and says, “I’m sorry about your arm. Maybe now you can get a cool robot arm instead. Like The Winter Soldier.”

Jonny gives a little laugh. “I’ll look into it.”

His mother waits until the door is closed before getting close on Jonny’s other side. All this time, her eyes hadn’t left David, like if she looked away for a single second he’d be gone again.

“He says he doesn’t remember much of anything from that night,” she says, and Jonny has to take a deep breath not to cry again, relief rushing through him and punching every single one of his nerves. “All I want is to run out of the room and make sure I didn’t imagine him,” she continues softly.

“I can’t believe it,” Jonny says. “I didn’t think—”

His mom’s hands touch the bed where Jonny’s arm should be but isn’t, her fingertips brushing the empty space. “Patrick told us,” she says, then pinches her lips together, looks in the middle distance in a way Jonny knows means she’s working up to something, so he waits for her to add, “I can’t decide if I’m mad at you or not.”

“I’d rather you not be,” Jonny says, and smiles a little when she laughs and gives him a sardonic glance. 

“I bet.”

There’s a long silence and Jonny doesn’t think she realizes she’s stroking the ghost of his arm. He looks away from her hands. “I’m sorry.”

“I wish you had told us.”

“I couldn’t face you guys and still do it.”

“I don’t know what I would have done if I had lost you too. I can only take so much, Jonathan.”

He reaches over with his arm, wincing as he twists, to glance his fingertips over her forearm. She looks down, surprised, biting her lower lip when she realizes what she’s been doing and flattens her hands on the bed.

“My poor boy,” she whispers.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers back, and it sounds wet to him. He feels so raw, so fuzzy and hurt and frustrated at his lack of control, like he’s spilling all over the place and everyone can see everything. He wishes he was done bleeding already. 

“Don’t be,” she says, pressing a hand to his cheek and leaning in to kiss his forehead. “What’s an arm compared to your life? To David’s? And Patrick’s and all the others? To freedom?”

“Feels kinda like a lot right now,” he blurts out and is filled with shame and guilt immediately. “I mean—I don’t think—”

“I know,” his mom says. 

He nods, settles back into his pillows. He’d have given more to stop The Harvester. He’d have given everything, if it had come down to it, though he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to. It occurs to him, in the grogginess of his mind, that maybe his mother doesn’t know that.

“I didn’t want to die,” he says, and she gives a dry sob when he does. “I just wanted to stop him. I… I didn’t want to leave you.”

She nods a few times, mouth a tight line, hands gentle on his sheets, gentle as she tugs them up his body like she used to do when he was a kid, gentler when she asks him why.

Jonny’s first impulse is to say because it was the right thing to do. Someone had to do it. He just finished what other people started. They’re not lies, but they’re not the whole truth either. 

He waits a long moment, swallows past all the other reasons, and finally says, “This whole town has learned how to lose people, over and over, for hundreds of years, but”—he licks his lips—”but I couldn’t. I couldn’t learn that.”

◉

The people of Harvest Falls, it turns out, while being good at enduring tragedy, are enormously inadequate at handling hope.

“It’s… a bit chaotic out there,” his mother says, and doesn’t elaborate.

Everyone wants to talk to Jonny, from Harvest Falls journalists, to the mayor, to the parents of the kids that came back, to the police. Everyone. But his parents, and the hospital, are careful about who they allow to see him, always asking him before letting people in. Jonny accepts to see the police and mayor and one journalist from the Daily Falls, just so the story is out there, but he can’t make himself face anyone else. The thought of all their gratitude or well-wishes grates at him. He can’t stand it. It was Patrick’s idea anyway, and it was Patrick who started it, and those other people before them, and Jonny makes sure they know that. He didn’t bring their children back to life. 

Tiki and Donna are the only ones he accepts to see and he’s so uncomfortable during the whole thing he almost hyperventilates after. He feels the shaky touch of Donna’s fingers over his cheek for hours.

Patrick spends a lot of time with his family, but he comes to see Jonny every day in the hospital and he comes every day once he’s back home too, sometimes spending the night. Jonny hates when he doesn’t. 

Jonny has a hard time sleeping. He’s never been comfortable on his back but he can’t sleep in any other position. His left side is too sensitive, and when he turns on his right side, the balance of his body is too off. He’s so hyper-aware of his missing arm, he can’t think of anything else.

When Patrick stays, he scoots over on Jonny’s good side, wraps his arm around Jonny’s waist, and presses his mouth or forehead onto Jonny’s shoulder. It helps, having him there. Jonny counts his breaths like other people count sheep, he matches their rhythm, he focuses on every point where Patrick’s body touches his and he can feel him there, feel his heart beating. He thinks about how Patrick’s alive and with him again and sometimes falls asleep on that thought. 

Patrick spending the night also means he’s not alone when he wakes up screaming. He isn’t like David. He remembers everything. When he jerks awake in the night from nightmares, looking around wildly with wide, scared eyes, and a frenzied panic that has him touching himself like he’s checking he’s whole, Jonny grabs him by the arm and squeezes tight, squeezes until it hurts, and tells him that he’s, “Alive, you’re alive, Patrick. You’re here. I’m here,” until he calms down enough to lie back down, shaking along Jonny’s body.

On the times Patrick goes back home, Jonny lies stiff on his back, unable to sleep, and wonders what Patrick does when he wakes up alone in his bed and scared. On bad nights, Jonny stares at the soft shadows of his bedroom cast by his childhood nightlight his dad put back because Jonny couldn’t stand the dark, and he wonders if Patrick is back at all, or if he’s dreamed him alive.

◉

Patrick’s birthday comes and it’s weird that he’s turning 18. It’s weird they’re not the same age anymore. Not as unsettling as it is with David, but there’s something about it with Patrick that keeps catching Jonny off-guard, even if it’s only two years and, in the grand scheme of things, two years is nothing.

It snows that morning and Jonny sits in the den, watching it fall over the garden, gift in his lap. He waits for Patrick to show up. His mother’s made a cake.

Jonny hates every moment Patrick isn’t with him, a simmer of panic in his core that only settles down when he sees him again. 

Patrick comes through the gate, hat low on his ears, scarf wrapped around his neck three times. He sees Jonny through the window and waves with a smile. Jonny can breathe again.

◉

The corn finally quiets when the winter settles for good.

◉

Jonny is woken up from a nap one afternoon by shouts coming from downstairs.

He drags himself out of bed. He still struggles with how off kilter his body feels, and walks with his hand gliding over furniture and walls. The shouting intensifies when he opens his door and steps onto the landing, leaning over the railing to listen.

“But where is he?” It’s a woman. “Where is my son?”

He can’t hear what his mother says, only the familiar soothing sound of her voice, and then the woman again,

“You got your son back! But where is mine? Where is my son?”

Jonny swallows hard. He wants to go downstairs and apologize. He wishes he could have brought them all back, all of them, he does. Instead, he leans on the wall and listens to the woman’s cries, listens to his parents coax the women into calming down, into finally leaving the house. 

He taps the bracelet on his right wrist with his chin.

Patrick bought them. It’s one of those silly, tacky things couples buy. You tap it and the other person feels the vibration of that tap in their own. 

Tap-tap. 

I’m here. 

Tap-tap. 

I exist. 

Tap-tap.

I’m alive. 

It takes three tries before Patrick responds, and Jonny’s almost worked himself into a panic, breath short, heart beating, when he does. He slumps back against the wall, goes through his breathing exercises until he’s calm again.

Tap-tap, goes his bracelet. Jonny smiles. It almost feels apologetic.

He leans his right shoulder hard against the wall of the staircase, since the railing is on the left side, and finds his parents in the kitchen.

“Why are we still here?” he asks from the doorway.

◉

Harvest Falls, not good with hope, is waiting for next Harvest Day.

It’s hard to believe, his mom explains, after over two-hundred years. People need to see for themselves. 

It makes sense. It pisses Jonny off all the same. 

“I want to move to Chicago,” he tells Patrick that night. Harvest Day doesn’t concern him anymore. It doesn’t concern Patrick. It’s of no concern to anyone, but Jonny doesn’t want to stick around for them to figure it out.

The question he’s really asking is left unspoken, but he breathes easy when Patrick says, “I’m coming with.”

◉

All winter they plan for it. Pack things up. Soothe their families. Coax them into believing that it’s really over, done with. That David and Jessica and Jackie will all be safe come next fall. That if they’re not certain, they can just drive back here and wait it out, see how it doesn’t happen.

Jonny gestures angrily at his missing arm, as if to say _do they think I lost this for funsies?_ , unable to voice it because he thinks he might just scream.

“I know,” Patrick says. “I know.” 

In the constant battle with their families, the tide turns when Harvest Falls is swept by a flu epidemic the likes of which they’ve never seen. And when Mrs. Lacrosse is admitted to the hospital for atrocious abdominal pains that turn out to be late-stage cancer. 

That’s the first time he doubts his actions too. 

He finds his mom poring over their cupboards, throwing old tupperware and unused-in-years appliances into a donation box so she can “just box up what we use,” when she gives him the news.

He wonders for a moment if he’s done the right thing. Mrs. Lacrosse, surely the first of many, wouldn’t be dying of cancer if Jonny hadn’t done what he’d done. One life a year to preserve and prolong so many. Then David comes running into the room and into Jonny’s arms, nose red and cold from being outside, and Jonny feels sick to his stomach with his own thoughts.

How many people in Harvest Falls have let things go on the way they did for so long because of that reasoning. Because they were happy and healthy and rich and anyway, nothing they could do about it.

Fuck this. 

That’s exactly what Patrick says too, “Fuck this,” when Jonny whispers it all to him, both of them in bed with covers over their heads, cozy in their pocket of warmth. “And fuck them all, too” he adds for good measure, certain and bold and everything Jonny had missed for so long.

◉

All winter, Jonny learns to do things one-handed. He walks everywhere in the house, up and down the stairs, getting used to the way his body balances. He switches his sneakers for slip-ons, practices zipping up his coat, washing himself. Little things that should be so banal and easy, but instead leave him angry and frustrated.

“You don’t need two hands to jerk me off,” Patrick says, mouth on Jonny’s jaw, his own hand sneaking down between Jonny’s legs. “Which is the most important thing, really.”

Jonny snorts, arches his back.

◉

When he’s awake in the middle of the night and everything else is quiet, he listens to the low sleeping hum of the corn, a lulling snore that usually takes him into more dreams of dark corn hallways and dark skies and twisty paths without end.

He starts wearing earplugs to bed.

◉

The first try is frustrating. Jonny is off-balance even after asking Patrick if he could reach behind himself and spread his cheeks for Jonny’s fingers.

He storms out of the bedroom, clumsily pulling his sweats on, and slams the door behind him, shiny streaks of lube left on the wood.

His bracelet vibrates while he’s sitting on the closed toilet and Jonny sighs.

“Sorry,” he says, weight on the jamb. Patrick is still in bed naked, though his cock is significantly less hard than it was five minutes ago. “I’m a dick.”

On his back, Patrick gestures to his crotch. “Look what you’ve done, Jon. You made it sad.” 

Jonny snorts, shucks back out of his pants, stepping on the bottoms with his toes to help it along, distracted and spurred on by the sight of Patrick taking his cock in hand.

“I can stretch myself,” Patrick whispers once Jonny has covered him with his body, holding himself up with his hand, mouth soft and pliable against Patrick’s. “You could watch.”

Jonny shakes his head. “I want to do it.”

Patrick rides his hand, then his dick. 

The first press inside his body is so much, so tight and warm and more than anything Jonny had imagined, that he has to stop Patrick with tight fingers on his hip. He sweeps the hipbone with his thumb and breathes through it.

“Jonny,” Patrick breathes, and something in his voice has Jonny’s eyes snapping to his face. He looks as overwhelmed as Jonny feels, eyes wide, like somehow this simple thing they’re doing is a revelation he wasn’t expecting. “I thought of this,” he continues, and Jonny can feel him trembling a little under his palm. “At the end, I thought of this, how I never got to do it. How much I’d wanted it and now I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t have it.”

“Your last thought was of getting dicked?” It’s a weak joke, but one he can’t help, not with the way he’s vibrating inside. Not with how raw Patrick’s words makes him feel. It’s enough, though, to make Patrick smile past his memory.

He scuffs Jonny’s jaw with his knuckles. “By you. I thought of getting dicked by you, asshole. And now I have and—” 

“Technically you haven’t yet. Just the tip doesn’t count.”

“Fuck you, just the tip totally counts.”

But with that he pushes down, takes Jonny inside himself until he’s all in and Jonny’s gasping with the feel of it, blinking at the ceiling. 

“Fuck,” is the only thing he manages, fingers flexing on Patrick’s thigh. “Oh, fuck.”

Patrick thumps him on the chest then leans in to kiss his mouth. “Boom, heartbreaker.”

“Oh my god.”

He comes when Patrick’s jizz hits him on the chest and spurts over his fist where he’s jerking Patrick’s cock tight and fast, the clench of his body around Jonny as he comes tipping him over. And he thinks if he was that type of guy, if he could come twice in a row without getting soft, he’d come again when Patrick pulls off his dick and Jonny catches his own come leaking out of him with his fingers.

Patrick reaches behind himself, awe on his face. Jonny can’t look away from it as they both stay frozen like that for a long while, fingers at Patrick’s hole, pressing Jonny’s come back in together.

◉

Patrick wakes him up later with a shout and Jonny reaches over right away, splays his hand over Patrick’s chest and presses, makes him feel him. He slides his hand up past his face and into his hair, grabs a handful and twists, pulls until it hurts and the pain brings Patrick back to him.

He doesn’t ask what Patrick’s nightmare was, it’s always the same. It’s dying. Or it’s being buried alive, in pieces scattered into a field. It’s being stuck and never waking up again. 

“Sorry,” he says, turning onto his side. The soft light of the nightlight creates warm lines over his face and Jonny traces a finger down his cheek. 

He shakes his head. He licks his lips and thinks for a second about saying nothing. His left shoulder hurts and he shifts, gives himself a moment, then says, “Sometimes,”—he finds Patrick’s wrist and and squeezes—”sometimes I realize I’m happy. Every day it feels a bit easier, and you’re there and we’re laughing or fucking or whatever; or I’m watching David play outside from the kitchen window; or I see my mom and dad laugh together in a way I haven’t seen them do in years, and I think, this is good. This is so _good_. And then I think—I wonder if this is just fake, if this is just a dream and I’m stuck in that maze and I don’t want to wake up because it’s everything I wanted and now I have it. And I try to shake it off, I do. But I can’t stop thinking about it sometimes. What if. What if this isn’t real? What if I’m just in that maze and you can’t wake me up?”

It hurts to say it out loud. It feels like a betrayal. 

“This is so much more than I was expecting when I set out that night,” he adds after Patrick stays silent. “It’s so much better than I thought I could have.”

“There you go then,” Patrick finally replies. “That’s your answer. You couldn’t imagine this so it must be true. And anyway”—he reaches out and wraps his hand around Jonny’s stump, making him gasp and squirm, always uncomfortable about Patrick touching him there—”if this was your fantasy, would you do this to yourself?”

Jonny doesn’t know what to say. 

“I woke you up every single time,” Patrick continues, a steely edge to his voice that tells Jonny he’s a bit angry. “All the times you didn’t want to wake up, I made you. You wanted to escape but I didn’t let you. If you were lost in it right now, I would wake you up. I would hit you and I would hurt you and I would stab you until you did. You hear me?”

“Yeah,” Jonny breathes.

“I won’t let you run away.”

“I won’t.”

“Good.”

“Don’t you dare ever leave me again.” 

“I won’t.”

“Okay.”

The silence is heavy, twisted and hurt, earnest and real in a way that Jonny finds comforting. This he understands now. 

“Besides,” Patrick says, finally, scooting closer. “Bet you couldn’t imagine my dick feeling this good in those dreams of yours.”

Jonny thinks he has a point.

◉

“Sometimes—” Patrick starts, and something in his voice makes Jonny stop packing his desk. There are half-full boxes all over his bedroom. Patrick sits on the bed, turning one of Jonny’s hockey trophies between his hands with a frown.

“What?”

Patrick licks his lips, puts the trophy in a box on the floor. “Sometimes I think I’m still dead,” he says. The thin winter light coming through the window is bright and the circles under Patrick’s eyes are dark. “Sometimes I think—I think this is, I don’t know, I can’t decide. But I think, I’m still a ghost and I swear sometimes people look at me and they don’t see me. They don’t. Cause I’m not there. I’m dead.”

There’s a question in there, Jonny thinks. Patrick’s asking something, but Jonny can’t quite figure out what. Sometimes he forgets that he’s lived with Patrick’s death for over two years, but remembers it much more recently. It clings to him like his own shadow.

He shuffles between Patrick’s knees and waits for him to tip his head back, to look up at Jonny, throat long and bare, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows thickly.

“I see you,” Jonny says, simply. Repeats it as he leans forward, presses Patrick into the bed and covers his body with his own. “I see you.” And again as he makes Patrick feel his weight, makes him feel Jonny there, solid and real. He scrapes his teeth against Patrick’s chin, sucks at the skin behind his ear. “I feel you.”

“Yeah,” Patrick exhales, relieved, fingers twisting into Jonny’s hair. “Show me.”

◉

Every mile between them and Harvest Falls makes it easier to breathe, like he’d been inhaling smoke all this time and now, driving away from the fire, the air is finally clearing. He rolls down his windows and takes huge gulps of it, winter wind hitting his face, freezing his eyelashes. This. This is truly waking up.

This is the start. 

Patrick reaches over the gear shift and squeezes Jonny’s thigh, hooting in delight when they see the first sign for Chicago. 

Jonny thinks about the maze sometimes. He feels teeth on the arm he doesn’t have anymore. Patrick has nightmares, and Jonny can’t let him out of his sight for too long. And sometimes, in the night, Jonny thinks he hears the sound of the sleeping corn calling him. 

But Patrick is right. He couldn’t have imagined this.

◉

**6\. LIVE. I GUESS.**

Check.

 

 

[(see on tumblr)](https://fenweak.tumblr.com/post/181019522826/weve-waited-for-the-calling-by-allthebros-the)

 

 

**Author's Note:**

>  **Detailed warnings** :
> 
> \- The curse: one child a year is sacrificed (at random) to a monster. They are eaten (not described but acknowledged)  
> \- One of those children is David, Jonny's brother, several years before the beginning of the fic. Sorry David.  
> \- Another one of those children is Patrick. He is a ghost in the story but *points at tags* happy ending :P  
> \- Jonny is very torn with grief over those two things, and his not-dealt-with grief does lead to his brave, but reckless actions.  
> \- The monster that plagues the town is described in details. Lots of teeth. Horror stuff.  
> \- At one point in the story, Jonny loses his arm at the shoulder. It's not super graphic, but it's also not _not_ graphic.  
> \- The aftermath of that permanent injury is discussed/explored a little.  
> \- The aftermath and messiness of the encounter with the monster is also somewhat explored. This is where the codependency tag is relevant.


End file.
